It's a bit late I'm guessing, but if you only deleted the files, they're probably still available on your drive. When the operating system sends the order to delete a file, it's actually saying "this space in the storage is free to be rewritten over." This is done for performance and storage longevity reasons. However, this also means that most "deleted" data is still available on the storage device, if you have the right data recovery program. There are ways to avoid that (writing garbage data over the original data can make it practically impossible to recover the original data, for example).
If you overwrote the files with blank ones: some programs "overwrite" files by deleting the old file and creating a new one with the same name in a different location on the storage, so it may still be recoverable! It depends on the art software you're using, though, as some do overwrite by placing the new file in the same physical location as the old one.
I don't know what OS you're using, but I've had success with Recuva on Windows or TestDisk on Linux in the past for restoring accidentally deleted files (can't afford mac/iPhone/iPad so no clue for those, never tried recovering files on android). Both programs are free, so why not? Also, if you are going to try a recovery, avoid saving files to your PC until after you've recovered what you can, as that could potentially overwrite the files you're trying to recover. If possible, put your recovery software on a flash drive or SD card or something.
Hope that was comprehensible and helpful. Good luck with your comic!
Thank you for the advice and concern! Though, sadly, I don’t think my situation can be helped. I use procreate for my art, which is pretty harsh when it comes to deleted files. They’re pretty transparent that they will not be able to retrieve deleted files for you, and after seeing this ask I checked for some sort of backdoor way but I’m not sure there is one. Even if my file was saved there somewhere, with all of the saving and deleting I’ve been doing in my ongoing war with my iPad’s storage I have no doubt it would be properly gone by now.
Either way, my issue isn’t so much that I deleted a file exactly as that I accidentally cropped my working canvas to a third of its size with no way to undo it. When a canvas is cropped in procreate, all artwork outside the boundaries is deleted, and when I exited the file afterwards, I lost all of my undo states, meaning there was no way to undo the change. It was a really stupid mistake that had to do with identical seeming files of which one of was my full working piece. I only realized I had cropped the wrong one when I exited the file. I’m usually hyper-cautious when cropping or deleting when it comes to procreate because I know it can be so fickle, but I got too comfortable this time…
So not a formal file deletion, but it was the best way I could briefly explain that I’d lost a full day’s worth of work…
The good news is that procreate handles text layers as vectors which are not deleted when out of frame, so when I restored the file to its proper size, I at least had the text placement still there. Placing text is not the difficult part of comic creation, but it’s enough of a skeleton to give me hope I can rebuild. I also have one or two WIP photos saved that I can trace back over (thank goodness) but an amount of artwork roughly equal to a full page has been lost. A tip if this ever happens to anyone else: if you have your screen recording turned on, you’ll be able to screenshot previous states of your work from the video footage to help yourself redraw. I had mine disabled however, because the recordings take up so much storage space of which I am going through a crisis over right now (I’ll either have to do some deep cleaning or pay up for extra storage :/)
But thank you so much again for reaching out and trying to help though! It’s really heartwarming that someone would reach out to try and help lol. I’m a bit of a technological dunce so it was good to know that these kinds of recovery can be possible (just not in this particular case it seems.) But hopefully I’ll be able to use these tips in the future if it ever comes to it, or they’ll be able to help some reader out there!
