For the past several months I've been working on a full port of the original Super Mario Bros. for Pico-8. Just today, I was working on implementing level checkpoints, and a few hours after stopping work on the prototype and putting my laptop to sleep, I came back to it. As happens sometimes, Windows went through a lengthy update process, and after it ended I attempted to bring up the file, and this did not work. On investigation, I found that the file now took 102KB, and was unloadable. I then attempted to load it using Notepad++, but all I saw was a tremendously long single line of blank spaces that read "nul" when I highlighted them.

If anyone knows of any methods for recovering .p8 files that have become corrupted, I would greatly appreciate any advice. I have been saving the prototype using the same file name for a long time, and the most recent alternate version I have is from 3 months ago, and it would require a great deal of time and work to rebuild.

Hopefully the backups directory might be able to help! https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_manual.html#_Backups

Thanks for the response. Shortly after starting this thread I did some Google searches for corrupted Pico-8 files and found a previous thread mentioning the Backup folder, and I was able to restore the file. =)

@JadeLombax I love a happy ending!