Hello,
Unfortunately the only backup was the corrupted file!
I use my other computers for affinity as opposed to this m1 mac, so the version I had was the version since I downloaded affinity designer originally.
The balloons were created in a separate tab within affinity designer, then copied and pasted over to my main project. I used a png of a balloon from the internet.
It is worth noting that although the corruption happened during the fill tool on the balloon in the main project, there was lag that was picking up when creating the balloons in the second tab. The lag was gradual and I assumed it was just from affinity not being polished yet for the m1 transition. I did not imagine that the software would be able to fill my storage so I worked through the lag without realising what was happening. I was mostly messing around with the fill, pen, and selection tools. Fill caused most all of the major lag I feel like, I assume it would be more resource heavy.
During the project when working on the balloons, I turned off metal acceleration, switched to OpenGl, and increased ram usage limit to mid.
I guess I will have to rebuild, oh well! "There are those who lost, and those who will lose", that is the nature of working on computers.
Thank you for the help!