Strange glitch

I’ve been working on a project file for a while now and everything has been working great until a strange glitch has occurred. The camera keeps flying in weird places with no directions to, pictures are disappearing in the middle of animation and it’s very concerning.nothing is changing in the timeline, just the canvas. I saved the file and quit and loaded it back up, but the same errors are happening in the sane places. Please tell me I haven’t lost my whole file.

Whew. Turns out it was corrupted and I needed to delete the ~ symbol from the end of my .anim and .aux files. Not sure how they got there though. If someone could tell me how to avoid that in the future I would greatly appreciate it.

The [projectname].anim~ and [projectname].aux~ are the backups files.
These backups are the previously saved versions of the project so removing the ~ character will restore the project to the previously saved version.

The originals (i.e. without the tilde ~ symbol) must have gotten corrupt somehow; either due to a crash or force-quiting the program while it was saving.

Another thing that sometimes happens is that animators will move the project folder while the project is open which can cause corruption or fail to save correctly. This should definitely be avoided.

Also avoid using accented characters, spaces or symbols in the folder path where projects are being stored. By this I mean not only the parent folder where the project folder is stored, but the entire folder path starting at the root of the hard drive - leading to the project folder itself.

The internal hard drive is where you should open projects to be edited on.
Avoid editing projects from external drives, USB drives or folders linked to cloud storage. These types of drives/folders can introduce delays which may cause your save to fail because a typical project contains a lot of data that needs to be written or updated.

Keeping to the above rules should help to avoid most corruption or saving issues.