Disappearing assets

[Kasper-V]

I'm using the current 1.9 versions of Designer and Photo, on a WIndows 10 laptop with 8GB of RAM and plenty of spare disk space. I was creating some assets -- I'd got up to nine subcategories each with sixteen assets -- when Photo froze. After a long wait with nothing happening, I restarted my computer and opened Photo again. The new category I'd created had disappeared, and so had several others that I created months ago. I opened Designer, which had some different asset categories, and tried to rename a subcategory, only to have Designer freeze too. Eventually Windows closed it, and once again I found several asset categories, including the one whose subcat. I was trying to rename, had disappeared when I reloaded Designer. 
Can anyone suggest where the assets have gone and if they're recoverable?

[markw]

I’ve never had that happen to me before, loosing Assets like that!
As for recovery I would think the easiest way would be to go to one of your system backups from before the "freeze" and retrieve the Asset file from that time period and replace your now "faulty" one with it.
The assets.propcol file is stored in a folder named; user.
See here for where it can be found on your system: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/98906-faq-what-exactly-do-the-clear-user-data-options-clear/
You will of course still have lost the changes you were making at the time of the freeze but at least that’s all you will have lost.

[walt.farrell]

All the Assets for a single application are stored within one file, assets.propcol. If the application crashes or freezes whole writing to that file it is likely you'll lose the entire collection, or at least major parts of it.

Exporting categories or backing up that file are the only mechanisms that allow recovery.

[Wosven]

14 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Exporting categories or backing up that file are the only mechanisms that allow recovery.

Some function or scripting to do it would be welcome... at some point, exporting each categories and sub categories (brushes, styles, assets...), is a shore we do les and less.

[David in Яuislip]

2 hours ago, Kasper-V said:

Can anyone suggest where the assets have gone and if they're recoverable?

Up in smoke and no. You have my sympathy

Not too long ago there was a post from someone who'd created an asset which crashed the program
So I followed the instructions and, sure enough, crash. What amused me greatly was restarting the program only to have it crash instantly. The only way out was to delete assets.propcol and lose what I had
It's a shame that bak files aren't created, at least you could go back to where you were, ought to be a feature request

[Kasper-V]

System backups. Er . . . yeah! I back up my work regularly, but I never got into the habit of doing that as I didn't have much storage for a long time. I must get it organised, and I'll certainly back up my assets before I make any future additions.
Meanwhile, I'll grin and bear it (though the grin may be a little forced). I didn't lose very much, as it happens, and it won't be a great deal of trouble to replace them.
Thanks for the advice, folks.