Recovering corrupt Adobe Flash CS6 FLA files

Adobe Flash CS6 is an application widely used in both in secondary and tertiary design classes. However Adobe doesn't support saving files to the network, in fact they don't even support installing CS6 on domain joined computers. This is short sighted of Adobe, surely a large component of their CS business is driven by education sales, all of which would implement some form of domain or networked environment. After having continued errors with saving Photoshop and Flash files to the network we implemented a policy stating that users should save to the local drive then backup to the network.

Flash FLA files are zips containing a number individual files inside. Often during the drawn out process of saving individual files and then zipping them, flash has a tendency to corrupt saves, especially when saving to network storage.

We recently spent time trying to recover a FLA file and came up with a process that can often recovery corrupt files.


The Solution

1. Install and open Winrar.  

2. Take a copy of your corrupted FLA file and open it with Winrar. File > Open Archive 

3. Repair the archive. This option is available from the Tools menu.

4. Choose a location to save the repaired archive to.
 

5. Use Winrar to open the file you saved in step 4.
File > Open Archive > select the location you saved the repaired archive to > select the archive 

6. Click "Extract To" and choose a location to extract the repaired FLA file to. This will unzip the FLA zip file into the individual files that are contained inside. 

Accept any errors, it may complain of CRC errors or say some files can't be extracted.  

7. Go to the location you extracted the archive to in step 6. Open the XFL file with Flash, it should have the same name as your original FLA file.  

On a computer with flash you should be able to double click it.

Your file should open damage free! Depending how damaged the archive is this may not work, however we found on most occasions it does and saves you a heap of time.