How To Recover Unsaved/Deleted Projects in Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro is a fantastic video editing software with powerful features, useful tools, and countless valuable integrations. It's reliable and easy to use, but even with such renowned software as this, program crash can still happen.

After hours of hard work, losing your projects in Premiere Pro can seem like a nightmare - but only if you don't know all the tips and tricks to recover them.

Take a look at this comprehensive guide and learn how to recover Premiere Pro project with the utmost ease.

Can Deleted or Unsaved Premiere Projects Be Recovered?

Adobe Premiere Pro has an excellent built-in Autosave feature that saves all your projects as you work on them, along with a Recovery Mode to prevent program crashes. Depending on the specific preferences you've set, the autosave function can kick in as frequently as every 5 minutes. Therefore, in most instances, you can recover unsaved Premiere Pro projects in cases where the program crashes or you experience a sudden power outage.

Deleted projects, however, are an entirely different beast. Whether you can successfully recover deleted Premiere projects depends on how long ago you deleted them and whether you deleted only the original file or removed it from your trash, backup, and other locations.

As a general rule of thumb, you can retrieve your files if you've deleted them from all locations with a professional data recovery software.

Initial Steps You Should Take for Recovering Premiere Pro Files

Whether your Premiere Pro crashed and you're looking at how to recover your files or know that you've made a mistake and deleted the files by accident, the key to recovering your projects is acting quickly.

When you delete your files, they don't immediately get completely erased from your system. Data fragments still exist and can be recovered as long as new data doesn't overwrite them.

What that means is that you'll want to take your computer usage to the minimum until you've gotten your files back. Any action you take - transferring files from your storage device, connecting your phone to your computer, watching a video - could overwrite the leftover data and minimize your chances of successfully retrieving your project.

The only thing you'll want to do when you realize that your project is missing is check the autosave folder, as well as all your regular folders, to see if it's stored there. If you can dig around and find your project - great. If not, stop using your PC immediately and start working on Premiere Pro project recovery.

How To Recover Deleted Premiere Pro Projects With Wondershare Recoverit

You'll have the best chances of success when trying to recover a Premiere Pro project by using a professional data recovery solution like Wondershare Recoverit.

It's an advanced solution with high success rates that can recover files or any format - video, audio, image files, or anything in between. It supports virtually all data loss scenarios, from accidental deletion to system crashes, and works with all devices and OSs.

It takes just a few steps to recover an Adobe Premiere project with Recoverit:

1. Install and launch Recoverit on your PC;
2. Select the location where the deleted Premiere Pro projects were stored;

   

3. Recoverit will automatically start scanning the selected location for lost files;

   

4. You can pinpoint files during scanning by file type, time, file size, or file tags;

   

5. Once you find the desired Premier Pro project file, select it and click Recover to retrieve your project.

   

How To Recover Unsaved Premiere Pro Projects

Method 1. Using Recovery Mode

To recover an unsaved project in Premiere Pro, you can use the convenient Recovery Mode in Adobe. It's a powerful little feature that can be exceptionally effective when you've lost your data due to a program crash while your project was open.

Follow these steps to recover an unsaved project in Premiere Pro using Recovery Mode after a crash:

1. Open Premiere Pro after a crash;
2. You'll see a notification stating Premiere Pro quit unexpectedly while a project was open;
3. In the notification, select Reopen;

   

4. Save the restored project to the main file;
5. Alternatively, restore a previous version by going to File > Revert.

   

Note: Remember, however, that the Recovery Mode only works if your program has crashed and only the first time you open the program after a crash. If your Premiere Pro crashes, you launch it, close it, and then relaunch it, you won't have the option to retrieve your lost project with Recovery Mode.

Method 2. Using Premiere Pro Autosave

As mentioned, Premiere Pro has an excellent autosave option that might help you retrieve your files. To recover Premiere Pro projects with autosave, follow these steps:

1. Launch Premiere Pro and access Files;
2. Select Open Recent;

   

3. Go through the files and look for those named ProjectName AutoSave or ProjectName Backup;
4. Open the saved project and go to File > Save as > Save.

To stay safe, once the Adobe Premiere Pro recovers your autosave, open it again and check its contents.

Method 3. Restore Unsaved Premiere Pro Projects Manually

Finally, if your Premiere Pro has crashed and you accidentally exited the Recovery Mode without recovering your files, you can still do so manually.

You just need to follow these steps:

1. Go to your project folder;
2. Go to your Autosave folder;

   

3. Look for a folder named RecoveryProjects;
4. Open the file version you want to recover.

From there, you can simply save the recovered version, and it will be treated as your original file.

Summing Up

Losing your Premiere Pro project is a stressful situation. However, you have several solutions to try and recover your lost files. Whether via the Recovery Mode, the Autosave folder, or by using solutions such as WOndershare's Recoverit, you should be able to retrieve your Premiere Pro projects without further issues.