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Can’t open backed up *.afphoto files


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I’ve backed up all the *.afphoto files from a project from the Affinity Photo folder on the iPad to an external drive for safekeeping. Today I checked some of them for integrity and Affinity Photo was unable to open any of them. Is this only because they are in a different location — i.e. would it be possible to open them if I copied them back to the Affinity Photo folder on the iPad? Or is there some other problem? I’m hesitant to delete the originals on the iPad before I’m sure that I will be able to access the backup copies later if I need them.

In a possibly connected issue I noticed that I now have second images of the files that I renamed in my current project. I see one image of the the original “unnamedxx” version and another of the “new name” version, and the “unnamedxx” version just displays an error when I try to open it. I tried deleting one of these unopenable versions and it seems to be Ok but this is also making me nervous as it seems to be a warning that I could be in danger of losing data.

Also: Why are there no project folders inside the Affinity Photo folder? This will make archiving and backing up projects pretty much impossible once I have more projects with a larger number of photos.

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10 hours ago, Eftaliotis said:

Today I checked some of them for integrity and Affinity Photo was unable to open any of them. Is this only because they are in a different location

No, they should open without issue.
 

10 hours ago, Eftaliotis said:

I’m hesitant to delete the originals on the iPad before I’m sure that I will be able to access the backup copies later if I need them.

I would NOT delete anything until I new the backup files were ok. Can you still open files from the default folder on iPad? If yes the original files are not corrupted. 

Some questions to narrow down issue:
How are you opening the files from HDD, Import or Open from Cloud? Does either way work or are both ways corrupted?
If you Import from Cloud you will get a new copy of the file on HDD which will save to the default affinity folder. That would explain the second images. 
If you Open from Cloud, a copy from HDD will be placed in affinity 'sandbox' , and edits will be saved back to HDD. (Same for default folder).

Are you using Files app to copy files to HDD?
Have you had issues with any other file types copied this way to HDD?

 

M1 IPad Air 10.9/256GB   lpadOS 17.1.1 Apple Pencil (2nd gen).
Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Affinity Design 1.10.5 
Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and betas.

Official Online iPad Help documents (multi-lingual) here: https://affinity.https://affinity.help/ 

 

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Thanks for the detailed answer! I copied everything over with the Files app. First off I was just double-tapping on the files in the folder in the Files app, since that was the only way I knew to open closed files in the Affinity folder on the iPad until I realized that “Open from Cloud” also accesses the local folders on the iPad. However, Open from Cloud also gives the same error. It’s a low-level Unix error message saying “Could not copy....” showing the exact path to the file it’s trying to open on the Unix subsystem inside iPadOS. (I’m intentionally not using Copy from... because I don’t want to copy the backups into my working Affinity folder.)

The external drive is a 2.5” 2TB spinning drive (Seagate Momentus) in an Icy Box USB3 enclosure. I’m connecting and powering it with the AV dongle, so power to the drive and the iPad through the USB-C connector on the dongle and the drive is connected via the USB-A connector on the dongle. I’m wondering if the latency of the spinning drive might be a problem. It shouldn’t happen, but if iPadOS is expecting SSD response times that could possibly explain it. 

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I’ve now done some more tests: I replaced the USB cable to make sure that wasn’t the issue and tried copying in different ways: Drag & Drop, long press and Copy and then long press and Paste, but always with the same results. The copied file can never be opened by Affinity. This doesn’t happen if I copy the file to another location on the iPad. Then it’s always readable. However, the copy is instantaneous when I do that, so I’m certain it’s not a real copy, since every .afphoto file is over 350MB. It can only be making a symlink, so what is being opened with the local copy is just the original file anyway. 

Here’s the error message I get when I try to open one of the copied files. (I put this one in the general backup folder, not in the specific project folder, so that I could identify it more easily for opening)

 

19121D79-8FA4-4633-A797-D95A71BEFD39.jpeg.961b5566ddd6bb17b5c56054507c3127.jpeg

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Now I tried something different: I copied one of the .afphoto files to a cloud folder. Then I attached the external drive to my PC and copied it onto the drive from the cloud there. Then I re-attached it to the iPad and opened the file in Affinity. No problem. So what is happening is that the files are getting corrupted when being written directly to the drive from the iPad. This is probably the same problem I am having getting 20-30% damaged files when exporting directly to the external drive from Affinity. In turn, this means that corrupted files are getting written without any indication that this is happening. Always doing this via cloud folders would be silly, considering that every .afphoto file (they’re probably actually packages, not files) is between 350 and 400 MB. 

This is not good. 😣

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Two more tests: Copied an .afphoto to an SD card. Opens fine from Affinity. Updated iPadOS to 13.5 and re-tested with the spinning hard drive, just in case whatever it is got fixed. No joy, all .afphoto files written to the spinning hard drive are still silently corrupted. The question now is, is it all spinning drives that are funky or just this one, or just this controller in this particular enclosure. I’ll have to find some additional drives to test with.

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1 hour ago, Eftaliotis said:

The question now is, is it all spinning drives that are funky or just this one, or just this controller in this particular enclosure.

Hopefully mods can assist with testing.

M1 IPad Air 10.9/256GB   lpadOS 17.1.1 Apple Pencil (2nd gen).
Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Affinity Design 1.10.5 
Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and betas.

Official Online iPad Help documents (multi-lingual) here: https://affinity.https://affinity.help/ 

 

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23 minutes ago, DM1 said:

Hopefully mods can assist with testing.

Possibly, but since I'm doing the copying with the Files app and not with Affinity it's probably not an Affinity issue. Actually, the same would apply to the corrupted Exports from Affinity when written directly to the external drive. They're being exported from Affinity, but they're being written by the iPadOS file system. All Affinity can do is to say to the file system, "Please write this". If something goes wrong in the write and the file system doesn't return any error messages there's nothing Affinity can do about it. 

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • Staff

I've gone through this process using a dongle and USB flash drive and files are written to and opened without any issues. So it will be worth testing with any other drives that use a physical disk to see if the same occurs, unfortunately we don't have any drives available to test with.

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