On Friday I spent a great deal of care creating a system of variables and applying it to new frames. When I open the file today I can see the created frames, and the correct values applied to an object’s properties, but it’s not referring the variable. The value is greyed out, and when I open the variables panel, there’s one collection of variables I had from before, but not the one I created on Friday.
I tried restoring older versions, but the issue remains.
I tried opening it in the browser, but the issue remains.
Any help to shed a light on this will be so appreciated!
Is everything in the same file? What you’re seeing is what is shown when you delete a variable. The good thing is that it’s easy to replace missing variables, but the bad thing is that I haven’t found a good way to document them for exactly this case. My files are really big and sometimes I have to quit and restart for some things to behave. I hope there will be improvements on tooling for theming.
Yes, and the file is actually not that complex. How do you mean replacing a missing variable? Going one by one?
I wish I had looked for a plugin to export variables for safe keeping 
I also tried re-creating a deleted variable with the same name and structure, but Figma won’t fetch it…