Can't open .autosave file in Publisher

[Timothy Blinks]

Affinity Publisher crashed on me, when I reopened the file all the changes from today were gone, with no option to recover. (I have File Recovery set in Prefrences to every 5 minutes). I'm on a Mac and finder tells me that file was last modified yesterday – the point to which it's returned.

I can find the .autosave file (in Users>My Name>Library>Application Support?>Affinity Publisher>autosave), and it was indeed last modified less than 5 minutes before the crash.

But I can't open the .autosave file with Publisher or find any way to access it.

What gives? The info is clearly there. How do recover the autorecovery file?

Edited March 28, 2020 by timothykitz@protonmail.com
spelling

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

First, it would be good for you to change forum display name so it isn't your email address. Using your email address publicly like that makes it easy for spammers to harvest it. You can change it so something safer at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/settings/

Sorry to hear you had that particular problem. There was a bug (fixed, I think, in the 1.8.3 beta) where, in fact, the autosave file was not being saved except when working on New files, but it doesn't sound like you hit that one if you have a .autosave file with the proper timestamp. (Unless you had more than one file open at the time of the crash, of course, and one of them was never saved.)

So you might try this: Rename the .autosave file to .afpub, and then Open it. I have sometimes had success doing that, on Windows, but it's not guaranteed to work.

[Timothy Blinks]

Thanks, I already tried changing my username and got a message about it not being allowed before I post 2 things. (Very helpful security there.)

Close, but no cigar otherwise. Renaming the file makes it open-able, but it's identical to old version – aside from one spread where the images looks corrupted, screenshots below –  and also doesn't incorporate the several hours of changes.

It's been fine for me before, but at least for the moment, it looks to me like Publisher's autosave and autorecovery can't be trusted.

Thanks,
Tim.

 

 

Edited March 28, 2020 by timothykitz@protonmail.com

[walt.farrell]

If it's any comfort, 1.8.3 should be better. But I'm afraid for now you've lost some work.

Some of us have good luck with the file recovery feature, others not so much. So learning to Save periodically is probably a good idea.