This document file is corrupted.

[Britain]

Hi,

I'm hours into a magazine layout in Publisher, with a tight deadline and suddenly my document file is corrupted and closes every time I open it. I'm hoping this can be fixed otherwise I'm going to be working xmas day to do the whole document again which I really don't want to be doing.

This happened whilst I was working on the document, I had just copied pages from another Affinity document to this one and a few seconds later I get this error.

I'm running a MacBook Pro 13" 2017 with Affinity Publisher 1.8.6.

Error message attached.

Thanks in advance for anyone that can help.

Shaun

 

[thomaso]

Hi Britain,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

Since the Serif team announced a holiday 🎄 message with reduced forums support (24 Dec – 4 Jan) you might possibly first save your document in a former, healthy state from the macOS > Time Machine backup (hourly 'snapshots' of the last 24 hrs) to avoid the need to redo the entire layout. – I don't know of a way or tool for users to fix a corrupted document.

In case a Serif staff member will pop in to try fixing your .afpub you could upload your corrupted .afpub here in advance or post a note requiring a private upload link.

If you have a former document state: Maybe you can avoid the issue by using the import option instead of copying content. It's in menu "Document" > "Add Pages from File..."

[Britain]

Thanks for the advice Thomaso. Unfortunately I don't have Time Machine as I move around a lot and don't carry an external hard drive, I thought iCloud was a safe option to be honest. I save everything to iCloud but the save file is corrupted too. The only option I have is to restart I think.

I'm not sure what you mean by a private upload link to be honest but you're correct that I wouldn't be able to publicly share it.

Thanks again.

[thomaso]

That's a pity. I don't use the iCloud but as far I understand it saves every file in its most recent state only – different to backups. The advantage of Time Machine are its hourly, locally stored 'snapshots', which work even if your backup drive isn't plugged in, even if not available for weeks. It might be worth activating/testing it for future issues. – Though you may exclude folders or drives from Time Machine, in case you want backups of just a certain folder it appears easier to use another backup software. In this case "Carbon Copy Cloner" can be very helpful and reliable.

With 'private' I meant a dropbox link, readable by Serif staff only. There is no general link, instead users can get offered one by a moderator, e.g. in situations like yours.

For an investigation of your issue it might be useful to know what could have caused the error: the method you used to transfer Affinity content from the other document. Note, you can't have "copied pages" but either copied objects (layers) or imported pages (via 'place', either linked or embedded / or via 'add from file').

[firstdefence]

I wonder if this would help, I've just posted this to another post...

Also take a look here, I've changed this path to the publisher folder: /Users/username/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitypublisher/Data/Library/Application Support

Change username to your "username"
There should be an autosave folder there, you can double click on an auto save file and tell finder to open with Affinity Photo, you will likely have to select all applications not recommended. when looking for an app to open the autosave file.

Worth a try.

[Britain]

Thanks for the ideas gents. I managed to push the deadline back by finishing the other issues first (I work on 3 magazine issues at a time) and will redo this one from the beginning.

Thomaso, It was from 'add from file'. The file the that I took the pages from works fine, if this is what caused the issue. I'm now adding the shift key to that cmd-s to make sure I have several save files.

Firstdefence, thanks for that mate, I think that would have worked if I'd done it straight away. Unfortunately I was working on a few documents at the same time which would have overwritten the file. I' definitely remember that for next time.

[thomaso]

On 12/24/2020 at 6:19 PM, Britain said:

I save everything to iCloud but the save file is corrupted too.

7 hours ago, Britain said:

I'm now adding the shift key to that cmd-s to make sure I have several save files.

Just in case: There are various reports about issues when working on / saving to a network drive (e.g. cloud, NAS) within Affinity. If your error is caused by this issue a "Save As..." might not prevent it. To avoid such issues it appears useful to work / save on a local drive and use the network as additional backup volume only and not from Affinity.