Question

I had a working application. I changed the project name through the targets section. A pop up window came through concerning changing references. I didn’t read it thoroughly and accepted the changes. Now 2 files are missing from my project and I don’t see them in my project folder or in the trash.

How might I find them? Undoing is not an option. Time machine is not an option. I do however have a ‘good’ build on my actual iPhone. Can I recover that project?

Answer 1

I’m afraid it’s probably not looking good. First of all, you won’t be able to recover the files from your iPhone, unless they’re assets (ie, graphics, media, etc). If it’s actual code, that’s a no go.

Secondly, when you rename a project XCode will ask you if you want to take a snapshot of the project – did you enable this? If you did you’ll be able to roll back to the project status before you made the change.

Of course, perhaps the project files still exist and they’re just hiding in your project: in this case if you can remember something inside the files you can grep your project directory for them (grep is a command line utility that lets you search inside of files: if you’re unfamiliar with it you can check this guide out).

If none of that works, consider this a lesson in version control. XCode has built in support for Git now – if you’ve never used Git or version control this could be a great time to learn. Version control lets you keep a history of all the changes you’ve made and roll back as appropriate (if, for example, you accidentally delete a file or make a change that turns bad). I’m simplifying a lot, but there’s a lot of great resources online about using Git, and now that it’s totally unified with XCode there’s no real excuse not to use it.