PocketTim

No. Following the comment from @anto I decided to take a look at this menu as shamefully I never had (I just left Publisher as it came by default) and switched off everything I don't use. So my set up is as per the image attached. Maybe this is the answer and hopefully I will see better stability with a few less things enabled but it does concern me that I have to be super careful with this. Affinity isn't exactly taxing my system even when my projects are near 99% completion.

MacBook M1 Pro, MacOS Ventura (but this was happening on Monterey as well). (I no longer use my Windows build). To be honest this is an issue I have raised in the past and never had resolved, I'm just piggy backing off the back of this thread now I can see someone with the same issue (although them using iCloud is a bad bad idea). Not really sure why I'm posting again to be honest because nothing gets done about it or can anyone work out why this behaviour has been happening to me for over 6 months. Just as an additional bit of information, I completely wiped my Mac clean a few weeks ago, Affinity Publisher came back on as a brand new install, our latest magazine issue, Issue 8, has been started completely from scratch. As described above, it can just quit for absolutely no reason. Did it this afternoon, the ONLY thing in the document was a two page spread without about 7 shapes and two text boxes. I went to change the colour of some text and the app just closed and vanished and all progress was lost upon restore. No images, nothing, so it's not as if it was struggling to find weirdly linked files or anything (which I have had problems with in the past in remote locations (but also sometimes local too)). The file is located in a my home user folder, not remote, I don't use iCloud syncing or Dropbox or anything else in that location having learned the hard way. Publisher, Safari and Trello were the only apps open. I have had incidents occur whereby Publisher has lost folder permissions to write to my home folder and my afpub has refused to save. The resolution for this has been to trash the app, reinstall and then try and access to afpub at which point Publisher will prompt for permission access. To try and counter this happening again, I have manually given full disk access to Publisher so hopefully that issue doesn't come back. It's stressing me out a lot at the moment to be honest. I basically now have to work like it's the '90s and hit CMD-S every few minutes out of habit, if I'm really unlucky the file will corrupt. This happened in our Issue 7 and I had to restore a Time Machine backup from the day before and rebuild about 8 hours worth of work from scratch again. I don't want to be "that" guy but my day job is senior level IT and has been for over a decade, I know my system inside out and back to front. I'm 99% convinced that now that I have stopped working with remote or network files that this is not something I'm doing. Publisher just seems completely unstable. I'm actually tempted to record a video of me working to demonstrate what occurs.

Ah I see. Ok well this is a menu option I'd never touched in the 12+ months of using Affinity so it's likely pretty standard but it raises the point of why should I? My machine is more than capable of handling affinity, if it collapses due to a few extra panels being open then that's a problem.

Sorry what do you mean by Studio?

I am having the exact same problem. I'm on the 8th addition of our magazine and the problem is just getting worse and worse. I don't use any form of cloud or remote storage (found out the hard way how much damage that does). Just sat down to start a brand new issue, totally clean document. Building the contents page with nothing but text and shapes and bam....app crashes and closes. Everything gone. Getting so unbelievably fed up.

@Pauls @Dan C So it got the point whereby I could not do anything, even moving an image 1 pixel in the project without Publisher crashing but seem to have resolved it. I trashed Publisher and reinstalled it from the AppStore. Upon launching the project I was having trouble with, interestingly it asked for disk permission access for two files that were in the document (both PDF's linked locally). I gave Publisher full permissions access to my entire drive and since then it has been absolutely problem free. I have no idea quite why permissions were lost in this way, my drive is only encrypted with FileVault, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary (this MacBook is only a month old). Those two PDF's are in the same location as every other file in the document as well so it's not as if I had them stashed somewhere root is needed. Anyway, all seems well now, perhaps the above might be useful in some way.

@Dan C afraid to report that all is not well. While working on this document Affinity either just randomly crashes and quits with no warning, or it doesn't allow me to save saying there isn't permission to save the document. A save as works but is about 10 changes behind what I last did. Attached is the crash log which just happened again after writing this post. CrashLog.rtf

@Dan C Thanks for such a rapid response and taking the time to look. Some of our older issues I worked entirely out of iCloud Drive and that was a nightmare and so have been so careful since to try and move all of our teams files to local, I guess just missing those one or two files has been the culprit. At the moment the relinked copy seems to be doing ok. I've sorted out my Time Machine drive and will be making backups of my backups from now on. Fingers crossed all is ok.

@Dan C Many thanks. I have uploaded the file. I have managed to recover it in a fashion but am slightly nervous about continuing to use it until I know if there was root cause in case I lose it again (I did this by migrating it over to my Windows Installation, opening it, then doing a save as, I then brought that version back over to MacOS and then relinked and resaved. Does seem to be ok but as you can imagine I am terrified it might break again, I'm doing hourly back ups now but it still doesn't fill me with a huge amount of confidence). Interestingly, moving it over to windows, making a small modification and then saving directly rather than a save as produced the exact same error that occurred on Mac suggesting it's a document issue. To answer your questions: 1. Which Operating System are you using? macOS Monterey 12.3 2. Which version of Affinity did the file last get saved in? 1.10.5 3. What drive type was the file last saved to (select more than one if needed)? Local disk 4. Any other information you think would help us try to find the problem I did notice that when I was relinking the elements in the "recovered" version that maybe 2-3 images were actually pointing to my dropbox folder where I had messed up and failed to copy them locally (probably when tired). However that Dropbox location is fully accessible and I wouldn't expect 2-3 files causing the whole document to go down...but might be relevant. Thanks.

Hi, I am in big big trouble right now. I have been working on our latest magazine all day everyday for three weeks. This morning I opened my publisher file to be greeted with a warning: After allowing publisher to close the document, reopening it tells me that the document is corrupted. I am working on macOS Monterey with the latest version of Publisher purchased via the AppStore on an M1 Pro. Stupidly I only have a backup from the 17th of March in Time Machine. I am working on files purely local, there is no cloud or network drive access involved. My deadline is Sunday...what can I do? I migrated the project over to my Windows desktop and managed to open the file there. However after making a small change, then saving it, re-opening it produced the same error. I really need some urgent help with this. I've been using Publisher for a year now and have never come across anything like this.

Trust me, it was so unbelievably basic and stupid that even a day one beginner wouldn’t have benefited from seeing what I’d done wrong.

Fixed issue. Please delete.

So some slightly good news, I have reverted back to 1.92 and can still open my .afpub file created and modified with 1.10 and saving and working is back to normal. Can't say this will be the case for everyone but it gets us out of a pickle for the short term at least.

I too am experiencing this same issue and it has brought our work to a complete halt. I can keep saving with ctrl-s repeatedly but I'm having to do this so often little work is getting done. I get on a roll with some work which makes me forget about the ctrl-s routine and then bam, everything I've been working on for 20 minutes is gone. I'm going to attempt a roll back to 1.9.2 and hope it works but we're on a tight deadline and all work has now stopped. Serves me right for updating too early.

Same issue happening here, no discerable cause. It's driving me insane!