My projects have disappeared

First: check the trash

Deleted projects go to Projects → Trash, not straight to oblivion. Library assets also have a Trash. Deleted pages do not: their media remains in Library, but the page text and layout cannot currently be restored.

Where projects actually live

Projects are edited from the app’s private storage on your device. A server copy exists only if you signed in and explicitly backed that project up with Studio Plus.

That has an unhappy consequence people discover at the worst moment:

After changing phone

For a cloud-backed project, sign in to the same parent account on the new phone and restore it from Cloud backup & device sync. You can always export each project as a .ddstory file on the old phone and import it on the new one; this works without Studio Plus and is also the safest independent backup. See back up and move your projects.

If the old phone is gone and a project was neither cloud-backed nor exported, it cannot be recovered.

A project opens but pictures are missing

An imported archive may be incomplete, or a file may have become unavailable. Open the page editor and attach a picture again. The current Library delete flow normally removes page links explicitly after warning you, so it should not leave a hidden dangling reference. If you have an older .ddstory backup, importing it creates a second project copy with the archived media intact.

An import fails

.ddstory archives are validated before they load, so a truncated or corrupted file fails cleanly rather than importing half a project. Check the file transferred completely — comparing file size at both ends usually reveals it.

Protect yourself now

Enable optional cloud backup for convenient recovery, and export a .ddstory archive of anything you care about for a provider-independent copy. Also keep the PDF — even in a worst case, a PDF is readable by anything, forever.