u/ChristopherC1989

I've been using procreate for almost 15 years now, and even after using it for all this time, I will still delete something by accident on rare occasion. When it happens, it is always the same theater of emotions. A feeling of desperation, hoping that I didn't just do what I think I did, quickly followed by the overwhelming frustration and gut wrenching acknowledgement that it has indeed happened. Finally followed by the absolute blinding rage at the fact that there is literally no way to just simply undo a delete.

I backup my procreate to the cloud, so typically, I would be able to do a restore, but my most recent backup is not within the window of me working on this project. I stupidly deleted a file that I thought was just a sketch file for this project, but the thumbnail deceived me. It was a duplication of the sketch file, and this version of it actually contained the work that I needed.

It's fucking gone. Hours of work, vanished with the single click of a button, and no way to recover.

I love procreate, I use it everyday. I use it for personal work and I use it for professional work. But holy fucking shit Procreate team, How have you not provided a way to recover a recently deleted file in all the time you have been up and running?

This was a stark reminder to me that procreate, regardless of its ability to perform, is not a professional program. The lack of ways to recover a deleted file is a massive Achilles heel for this app. I'm not an app developer, but I feel like this should be an easy thing to develop. Other programs have it, how is this not a thing?

With that being said, I am off to pick myself up and start over... un-fucking-believable.

I am not sure how everyone else goes about their procreate file use/creation, but for me personally, I have a "template" canvas I made a while back, and I typically just duplicate it to make new canvases. I then treat those canvases essentially like sketchbooks and I will doodle and draw on layers until the layer capacity of the canvas has been reached, sometimes taking weeks or months. I then repeat the process(unless I am doing a more serious project/commission which I will make a canvas for each specific use case). So, I end up with lots and lots of canvases each with hundreds of layers full of drawings. I can literally go in and just flip through layer after layer and see a "page" full of drawings, doodles and sketches.

So, when my iCloud backup informed me that it was maxed out with hundreds of gigs and could no longer back up my iPad, I found myself confused. I only use my iPad for drawing, there is nothing else on it. And I know I draw a lot, but these files should equate to maybe a gig, if that, each. How have I maxed out my Storage? Then I looked at my memory and realized Procreate was almost 300 gigs of storage.

Well, I guess when I made the "template" canvas, I forgot to look and make sure that "timelapse recording" was turned off. I had been making canvases that had been recording hours and hours of drawing each. Which resulted in each canvas being several gigs large. Some of these video files I downloaded turned out to be 5-6 hours long each, lol.

As fascinating as it was to watch weeks/months worth of drawings played back at 10x speed, It def wasn't worth the amount of memory. I just went through and purged like 30-40 timelapse videos from each canvas and freed up hundreds of gigs. lol

TLDR: If you have an abnormal amount of memory being eaten by procreate, make sure your timelapse function is turned off on old canvases and is off for future canvases unless you need it for something specific. You may have hundreds of gigs just collecting dust for no reason!