[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

9 minutes ago, SrPx said:

Great!! 

PD: I believe once you are editing a post or making a new one, the cyan colored area below the text area, you drag a file there from a Windows folder, and it should work. Unless there's a problem which I am not aware of.

Thanks. Today, it seems that nothing (and no-one) likes me. ;-) Better luck next year?

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

4 hours ago, SrPx said:

I am curious, though...Were you able to configure your Windows at 115%, 120% or something like that, something that worked well with your Affinity apps? Or another factor? Leaving it at something comfortable, of course. 

Thanks. Great idea: Setting the Windows Scaling to 120% is a reasonable compromise... until Affinity resolves the issue. The "Export" & "Cancel" buttons are visible.

(Forum won't let me upload a screenshot.)

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

10 hours ago, SrPx said:

I had a full crash at the start of  using any V2 app when double clicking the color sample (be it the foreground or background one), until I read a crash log that made me think of Windows scaling. I had set it at 110%. Turns out that after quite some tests, discovered that it makes it crash at 110% and 102%. Probably at other random factors. But NOT in many others. Like, it works perfectly at 109% (which looks kind of identical than 110%) , 125, 111, 140, etc.

But not choosing the "standard" Windows scaling option, but the "custom or advanced" one, where you type (instead of choosing one from a deploying menu list) a number. It is a different problem and type of dialog, but could be related to the same root, problem or type of issue. I would try to set in "custom/advanced", in that Windows Settings Screen configuration, other factors, like 115% or 120%, etc, till you find a factor that works for you. You are not restricted only to 125% or 100%. If you find it working so like I did, it's a bunch of months of use that you would earn before the issue gets fixed. It worked amazingly well for me.

Edit: You might need to reboot your Windows for everything to take effect and work well.

Thanks for this. An interesting discovery, and useful work-arounds. I hope Affinity locates and fixes the crash problem very soon.

I hope Affinity recognises that many people (need to) use Windows Scaling so as to work comfortably with their PCs, and that Affinity soon resolves these problems.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

Sadly, I've had to switch this laptop back to AF Photo V1. So the problem with large unwanted "autosave" files has come back. Some of these files are over 200MBytes, so the laptop's hard drive is filling-up fast.

AF Photo V2 was hopeless on this laptop: Although its 1366 x 768 screen meets the Affinity tech spec, unfortunately a design bug in Affinity V2 means that its dialogues don't work if "Windows scaling" is set to 125% rather than 100%. (Some ancient Serif "Plus" programs had the same problem. I thought that Serif / Affinity had learnt the lesson.)

If I set Windows Scaling to 100%, text is too hard to read.

The first AF Photo V2 dialogue to fail is the vital Export dialogue. (Which in AF Photo V2 is a single long dialogue instead of the two dialogues in V1.) Unfortunately, the "Export" and "Cancel" buttons are fixed on the bottom margin, below the bottom of the screen. There is no way to scroll to them, and "tabbing" to these buttons does not work properly either.

[Photo V 2.0.3 on Windows 10 - Export Dialogue too tall for laptop display - Export Button Hidden]

Bought & installed Affinity version 2.03 on a Windows 10 laptop with a 1366 x 768px display. This appeared to meet the Affinity tech specs.

Affinity version 1 had worked OK on this laptop.

But, on first use of Photo 2, the processed photo could not be "exported" using the File... Export dialogue:

The "Export" & "Cancel" buttons are hidden below the bottom of the new combined export dialogue. The height of the dialogue cannot be reduced by dragging & the dialogue cannot be repositioned to make these buttons visible. The trick of "Tabbing" through the various setting in this dialogue to reach the "export" button did not work because the tab sequence was not obvious.

See the attached screenshot.

Other dialogues in Affinity 2 may suffer from similar problems.

At present, this means that Affinity 2 is not usable on this ordinary Windows laptop.

This is a serious accessibility and usability issue.

Please consider making these buttons visible.

BTW. As is fairly common, the "display scaling" in Windows is set to 125% so as to make text readable on this laptop's small screen.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

3 hours ago, henryanthony said:

I have been working for only a short time with Affinity Photo and, FWIW, if I create a new file, edit it, and save it, a file is created in the "autosave" folder. After I quit Affinity Photo, the autosave folder is empty, no files there at all.

Just my personal experience. Windows 10 Pro. File recovery interval is set to 300 which is the default.

Thanks. That's good news... for Affinity.

We seldom "save" Affinity Photo files; just "export" the results of the tweaking.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

2 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Serif sadly does miss a lot to explain in general & more detail about certain app functionality inside/among the Affinity help files and also their FAQ entries. - The term "autosave" will not appear there and so most ordinary (non-technical) users might therefor not know that it's associated with the "File recovery interval, Preferences --> Performance setting" at all. - That's BTW also the reason why I above suggested to always best search via Google through the forum contents (aka possible existing threads) then for the "autosave" files term. Since most themes & problems etc. have been already discussed x-times before in the past in the forum!

Thanks. But as always, it is easier to guess suitable search terms AFTER you have found the answer!

Thanks for pointing to the "File Recovery Interval" setting. In our use, where we are mostly tweaking existing photo images, that feature is probably not helpful, so I will probably increase the "Interval."

BTW. I have just processed a photo on my Windows 11 desktop PC from its internal hard drive, using Version 2.03. Affinity saved no "autosave" or "crash report" files.

BTW2. I've now cleared old "hidden" drivers for USB storage devices in the Windows Device Manager of both PCs. For some reason, these entries seem to accumulate in Windows when you use lots of USB devices, or the same devices via different USB ports. When these entries hit a limit, Windows seems to misbehave. One symptom is that the "Safely Remove" feature becomes unreliable.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Don't know how many suffered from that. - Many people had even harder OpenCL/GPU based problems and app crashes with the v1 apps.

Yes, but Affinity provides a setting for fixing the GPU problem. There is also information in the Affinity Help file. There is no setting nor information about this problem with accumulating unwanted autosave files.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

26 minutes ago, GeoffH said:

Win10 Home probably defaults to conserve power on a laptop so that's one option to try. When I was working and had a laptop for work (3D MCad modelling) we changed the power settings from the default and also ran off docking stations.

Thanks. Win10 Pro probably has better features for dealing with external and networked files.

I'm wondering whether Win10 Home still allows access to settings such as "write behind" which might delay the writing of large files to these external drives? (With each update, Microsoft seems to "simplify" (ie. dumb-down) the amount of user control.)

Alternatively, perhaps the scanner automatically set the TIFF files to "read only" and that is upsetting Affinity?

I'll have another look.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

19 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Well, if you would have done before some Forum- or Google search about that topic ...

• autosave site:forum.affinity.serif.com

... you would have discovered a bunch of threads and discussions about the "autosave" feature theme of the Affinity apps, since it's nothing new for many forum users here.

Maybe, but trying to help diagnose the troubled laptop's full hard drive by telephone, I had no idea that the problem was caused by a glitch in Affinity or that Affinity could cause such a problem.

Once I had physical access to the laptop and had found & cleared the problem, I did search Google and these forums, but although I saw a few posts, none seemed relevant and many related to Beta versions.

How many ordinary (non-technical) users have unknowingly suffered this glitch then ditched Affinity or their troubled PCs?

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

48 minutes ago, GeoffH said:

This sounds like an issue that may not be directly related to the program, rather the machine configuration/specification causing multiple crashes.

Thanks. Apart from Win 10 Pro instead of Win10 Home, it sounds as if your PC is a more powerful desktop. Do you normally process files from your PC's internal drives, rather than external USB hard drives? Do you often process large TIFF files?

I hope that a change to the configuration of the laptop can reduce the problem, but wonder what? Laptops are normally set to optimise saving of battery power.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

47 minutes ago, David in Яuislip said:

I've been meaning to finish this for ages and here it is, a Powershell script to clear up after Affinity
It will remove autosaves, crash reports and their attachments for Photo & Publisher Version1. As written it will act on files older than 15days, this can be simply amended as shown in the comments - edit with a text editor.
There are two scripts, CleanupAffinityClutterSAFE.ps1 uses the  -WhatIf switch and lots of pauses so that files/ directories that would be deleted will be shown but not actually deleted. Run that first then when you're convinced it works run CleanupAffinityClutter.ps1 to delete them
It works very well in Яuislip but use at your own risk. I'm not going to use V2 so I'll leave it to someone else to produce a modern version. Oh yeah, also cleans up after G'MIC
Merry Christmas

CleanupAffinityClutterSAFE.ps1 2.62 kB · 1 download CleanupAffinityClutter.ps1 2.5 kB · 0 downloads

Many thanks for doing this.

However, this Affinity problem was a complete surprise to me, followed by the lucky discovery of the hidden 750GBytes of appdata files. How many other Affinity customers have been hit (unknowingly) by this problem and then assumed that their PCs or MACs were broken, or that Affinity programs were "rubbish"?

At the very least, Serif / Affinity needs to warn customers: eg. the help file for the next Affinity update should have information about these autosave files.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

To detect what the .autosave files in fact contain you could try this:

• With the app closed move or copy one of these .autosave files from its system folder to a documents folder.
• Rename the copied/moved file including its suffix from .autosave to the suffix of your Affinity app (.afphoto, .afdesign, .afpub).
• Open the app and open this renamed file. If it wasn't saved by Affinity as incremental temp data only then it may open and appear as one of the previously used documents.

This might help to detect what's going on or what in particular resists from being auto-deleted.

Thanks. If this continues, I'll try to look more closely, but am a bit distracted at present.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

One more reason of not auto-deleted .autosave files could be caused by an app preference which makes Affinity automatically reopen those documents which were not closed before the app gets closed. If you have this option currently ticked you could try if it helps to deselect it:

Thanks. I believe that Affinity was NOT set to reopen documents on startup.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

10 minutes ago, thomaso said:

I was asking because you said …

… which sounds unclear what gets created "each time it is used": autosave files only or crash reports?

That could be a possible reason for issues. It was commented various times by Serif moderators that USB drives work different than local disks, especially regarding their mount states respectively accessibility for apps. Depending on the USB drive it may happen that it gets unmounted automatically, for instance if the computer doesn't notice active access, which may happen if the computer switches to sleep mode temporarily or if Affinity is not the front most app and gets set in a kind of an idle mode by the operating system.

So it could be at least worth to test if your issues still occur when all files related to an opened Affinity document are saved & accessed exclusively from local drives (no USB, no network, no cloud volume).

I have not done reliable tests, so have not identified exactly why and when these files are created.

But having cleared them a couple of days ago, I was surprised to find another 1GBytes of unwanted files from yesterday's use. From memory, each autosave file was about 140MBytes. Each original TIFF files was probably about 80MBytes.

So this problem very quickly fills the PC's hard drive.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

7 minutes ago, henryanthony said:

Interesting, my path to autosave is a bit different:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Photo\1.0\autosave

My system is Windows 10 Pro.

Yes, from memory, that is the same location. But I've since deleted everything so cannot check.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

It does, if the file you were working on was not previously saved (i.e., is unnamed). If it was previously saved, you are only offered the recovery option the next time you try to work on that file.

Thanks. But in our usage, once a TIFF file has been processed into a JPEG, it is unlikely to be accessed again. So if Affinity's clean-up mechanism relies on accessing the same file again, it will fail in our usage. 

I can understand that this clean-up mechanism might suit some users, particularly "digital artists" who put a lot of effort into each creation, perhaps adding more detail each day to the same file, but this mechanism is less useful to people who use AF Photo to process lots of different images.

Perhaps that's why my old Serif MoviePlus X6 video editor has an option which automatically "deletes oldest unused helper files"? Note. Admittedly, those helper files are a just time-saving feature rather than a safety data-recovery feature: If these files are deleted, the program recreates them if they are needed in future.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

12 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Again, .autosave files are not "unwanted" but rather a condition to run Affinity and handle its own temp data. Maybe you mean a behaviour of these files not being deleted automatically once their documents and in particular if the app was closed?

Do I understand right that you get crash reports every time you run V1 – but without experiencing crashes?

In addition to this: My Affinity on a 2015 mac almost exclusively kind of crashes when I want to simply Save open documents though there is no further disk than the 1 internal SSD attached. About 2-4 times a month it displays various error messages as soon I use the Save command ("can't read" / "file lost", "must close", "file corrupted") with an app freeze at a certain stage and unfortunately even corrupted documents of the old, opened, unsaved file versions, which makes me wish Affinity would not overwrite an existing document on disk if it is unable to do it correctly.

Thanks. Yes the build-up of these large files is a problem. I would prefer Affinity to offer to recover problem files next time the program is opened; if the user chooses not to recover old files, Affinity should delete them.

But no visible crash or recovery messages have been reported. I have not tried matching the (hidden) crash report files with the (unwanted) autosave files so do not know whether each autosave file is related to a crash report.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

5 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Affinity unfortunately is quite crash happy, for no apparent cause. It is possible that certain hardware / software increases the probability, e.g. GPU and driver, but Affinity can crash for so many different causes (often unfixed bugs of Affinity apps) that it does not make any sense to dig deeper - it is basically impossible to identify specific causes and avoid them.

Thanks. In my simple use on my Windows 10 / Windows 11 i5 desktop PC, I've noticed very few crashes with version 1, and none yet with version 2. Sometimes after major updates, Affinity has run more slowly, but has usually become faster when later updates contain better optimised code.

My main use of AF Photo is to tweak JPG photos for posting on Social Media and my websites. I seldom use lots of layers or complicated adjustments.

When I have time, I'll try my old Windows 10 i5 PC and see whether it has loads of there unwanted autosave files.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

31 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Just in case:

• V1 and V2 are two separate programmes that have no influence on each other's documents and system files. So uninstalling one would not help the other.

• "unwanted"? You cannot avoid creating .autosave files, they are part of Serif's decision to handle temporary data. As they are incremental, you may get more than one file for an opened Affinity document, in addition you may get files caused by Affinity documents placed / linked in your main document.

Yes, I uninstalled Version 1 to save space and to avoid the possible confusion of trying to open new files using the old version. I was also hoping that any strange glitch might not affect the new version.

It looks as if Photo Version1 has been creating these massive unwanted autosave files (and stored but not displayed crash reports) each time it is used. I'm wondering whether it's something to do with using the external USB hard drives?

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

In my impression there were quite a few reports of disk space issues, mostly on Windows. As a non-affected user (and on mac), I never dived deeply into these threads, but a search for "PersonaBackstore.dat" might shed more or different light on your unexpected lack of storage, which is different to the not auto-deleted .autosave files:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&q=PersonaBackstore.dat&quick=1

Thanks. I gave up on Macs in 1986, at about the time Steve Jobs first left Apple. 🙂 (I moved to my still much missed Acorn RISC/OC before being dragged to firms' PC.)

I've now uninstalled their Version 1 and installed their new Version 2.03 so I hope this behaves better.

Interestingly, Version 1 had added 1GBytes of unwanted autosave files, yesterday, without displaying any crash reports, although it had stored a couple.

Thanks again to everyone.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

10 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

Some options to tackle this:

• create a shortcut on Desktop to the folder, and let the user clean up unneeded files once a week (my personal preferences)
• very unsafe: create a scheduled task deleting all files from that folder. 
• use treesize free once a month to find large unneeded files (iTunes backups of iPhones were my largest issue besides automated Affinity files, and some forgotten video cutting temp files)

Thanks. I saw your previous post about this when I searched the forum. 

With so few posts about this, some during Betas, I was wondering whether there is a specific reason for problems with this particular Windows laptop? It has a modest i3 CPU, and is several years old. The owner frequently works with large (80MByte) scanned TIFF files stored on external USB hard drives, tweaking them and exporting as JPEGs.

Windows usually warns if the PC is shut down while a program is running or if an external hard drive is still busy, but perhaps AF Photo takes time to tidy up after working on these large TIFFs?

Serif / Affinity should not expect it customers to delve into the Windows Appdata file. So if this is a widespread problem, the Affinity programs should provide a way to clean up obsolete files.

Having failed to help diagnose the reason for the "full hard drive" by telephone, I'd feared that the laptop or at least its hard drive needed replacing. Have other (non technical) Affinity customers fallen into this trap?

I've bought them a copy of Affinity 2, hoping the laptop meets its specs. We'll see whether the problem happens again. At least we now know where to look.

Thanks to everyone who has answered.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

47 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

That's only for Photo 2. For V1, the files would be in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Affinity\Photo\1.0\autosave and that AppData is by default a Hidden directory, I think.

Thanks. Yes, this was a non-technical owner. So it was safer to keep Windows folders hidden in order to reduce disasters. But this also made the problem harder to diagnose by telephone. The owner had used Google to look for how to cleanup their hard drive, but those solutions were defeated because the Windows Appdata folder was "hidden."

Other programs can clear old files, automatically or manually: Eg. Serif MoviePlus X6 can delete its obsolete "helper files." But I've found no similar feature in Affinity, nor any reference to autosave files by searching the Affinity Help.

[750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?]

Looking for help and advice please:

The hard drive on a Windows 10 laptop was almost full, so running very badly. Eventually I discovered that the User Photo Appdata folder had about 750 GBytes of unwanted Photo Autosave files, plus masses of crash reports. The laptop's owner had not mentioned seeing crashes.

Questions: 
1. Have other people had this problem?
2. Is there any way to stop AF Photo doing this, or any AF Photo feature for clearing these files (manually or automatically)? 
3. Any other suggestions, please?

These unwanted files were in the AF photo folder within the Windows User's "hidden" AppData folder, so had not been reported using normal Windows file or storage tools. The files had dates going back months, including today, even though no crashes had been noticed.

BTW. That copy of AF Photo 1.10 was set to NOT send crash reports or to reopen files on startup.

[Question: How Best to Create ePub / Kindle from Publisher?]

1 hour ago, lmarcos said:

Just a tip for you, LibreOffice can export directly to epub. If the output from the default export filter doesn't suit you, you can install the writer2html extension. You'll still need to tweak the css for some styles, but its output is rather clean

Thanks for that tip about the LibreOffice extension. I hope Affininty Publisher is soon updated to at least provide a means of exporting text and stories, so that the same content can be used in other programs.