I recently spent several days working on a timeline and the next time I opened the app it was gone. I’ve tried everything I can think of and email tech support twice with no response. It’s not in my recovered files. Is there any way to recover it or am I out of luck?
Can you see your timeline file on your disk, using either the Mac Finder or the Windows File Explorer? If it’s not where you expect to find it, search for it by name.
If you can find it, double click it and see if it will open.
I’ve tried searching and looking in “manage backups” but I guess it’s just gone. 
Hi Rory, Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.
We’ve emailed you back with some ideas on how to find the missing file, but the best I can suggest is to try searching your device or One Drive for any .aeon files. 
You have my sympathies. Losing work is terrible.
This may not be a problem with Aeon. I’ve never lost a file, although I recognize that doesn’t mean I won’t later today.
Computers are not entirely trustworthy. Start keeping backups.
Syncing to One Drive is great but do not for even a half-heartbeat consider it a backup.
If an app, a bug in your hard drive’s firmware, an OS problem, or user error clobbers a file, syncing to One Drive will just ensure you’ve got a second copy of now useless data. Worse, that useless data is now automatically replacing your good copies on your other devices.
I’m skeptical of software bundled for free on hard drives. Find a utility that will keep continuous backups from a company with backing and lots of customers, and keep more than one backup device in rotation. Encrypt your backups and keep one set somewhere other than your home office. If nothing else, rotate your oldest backup into the center console of your car. You don’t want your work to disappear in a burglary.
If you use a Mac, Apple’s Time Machine, a free component of MacOS, is great.
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This is excellent advice.
For what it’s worth, I use these local and cloud-based solutions:
- Backblaze for continuous cloud backups
- Acronis True Image for local (external drive) and cloud backups
- OneDrive* to enable me to move from desktop to laptop
*OneDrive has a versioning feature, which tends to mitigate the problem of saving a corrupted file. That said, I completely agree that it is not a sufficient backup of one’s work in progress.