autosave files / file reopen behavior Windows 10

[NotMyFault]

Hi,

1. Unwanted accumulation of auto-save files.

over a period of about 4 month (January to March 2021), Affinity Photo collected 68 files in the auto-save folder

%appdata%\Affinity\Photo\1.0\user\autosave

In addition, the beta sub-folder accumulated about 37 files.

%appdata%\Affinity\Photo\1.0 (Beta)\user\autosave

In total, this consumed about 20GB on my system SSD which can lead to low free disk space issues.

2. Inconsistent restart / re-opening of files

Based on some bugs when OpenCL, i need to occasionally toggle the related "OpenCL" setting in Edit>Preferences>Performance. Photo then enforces a restart of the app. Then result of the forced restart is inconsistent / kind of a lottery:

1. Photo might restart and re-open the file(s) which were open before (expected)
2. Photo might re-start, but does not re-open the files
3. Photo might not re-start at all.
4. Photo might show a popup about auto-saved file(s) - despite i closed all files cleanly during the forced restart process.
5. Photo might produce orphaned auto-save files despite all files closed cleanly.

This issue cannot be intentionally provoked, but happens about 2 times a week in average over 4 month.

 

Unfortunately, i needed to delete all auto-save files to recover some free space. If this happens again - what can i do to document the issue for the devs?

 

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Based on some bugs when OpenCL, i need to occasionally toggle the related "OpenCL" setting in Edit>Preferences>Performance. Photo then enforces a restart of the app. Then result of the forced restart is inconsistent / kind of a lottery:

1. Photo might restart and re-open the file(s) which were open before (expected)
2. Photo might re-start, but does not re-open the files
3. Photo might not re-start at all.
4. Photo might show a popup about auto-saved file(s) - despite i closed all files cleanly during the forced restart process.
5. Photo might produce orphaned auto-save files despite all files closed cleanly.

1. For #1: How do you have the Affinity Preference for "Reopen document on startup" set under General?
   Also, if you had any modified files open when you told Affinity to restart, how did you respond to the prompts to save the modified documents?
    
2. That is dependent on the Preference I mentioned above.
    
3. I have noticed that sometimes, even when closing the Affinity application manually (clicking on the X button), and then clicking on the application shortcut. Sometimes when this happens, I find a crash report has been generated.
    
4. No ideas on that one.
    
5. If Affinity crashes while you are editing a named file that has an autosave file, and you do not have the Preference set to reopen documents at startup, then you will not be prompted to recover the file unless/until you try to open the original file sometime in the future. That could be hours/days/weeks later. These are not orphans. They hold work you were in the middle of, that you simply have not yet resumed.

[NotMyFault]

13 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

1. For #1: How do you have the Affinity Preference for "Reopen document on startup" set under General?
   Also, if you had any modified files open when you told Affinity to restart, how did you respond to the prompts to save the modified documents?
    
2. That is dependent on the Preference I mentioned above.
    
3. I have noticed that sometimes, even when closing the Affinity application manually (clicking on the X button), and then clicking on the application shortcut. Sometimes when this happens, I find a crash report has been generated.
    
4. No ideas on that one.
    
5. If Affinity crashes while you are editing a named file that has an autosave file, and you do not have the Preference set to reopen documents at startup, then you will not be prompted to recover the file unless/until you try to open the original file sometime in the future. That could be hours/days/weeks later. These are not orphans. They hold work you were in the middle of, that you simply have not yet resumed.

Hi Walt,

i can't remember ever changing the general settings, here they are.

ad #1: To answer my own questions: the most frequent cause of Photo not re-starting might be another Photo instance is already running. This a another mystery, as photo normally refuses to be started more than once. 

[stokerg]

Hi @NotMyFault,

Thanks for your feedback on this.

I've asked the rest of the Tech Team to keep an eye out for this happening to them, so we can look into it further.  Also if you happen to find a reproducible recipe for the forced restart issue, please do come back and let us know, as we can get it logged  

 

[walt.farrell]

On 5/1/2021 at 3:51 PM, NotMyFault said:

To answer my own questions: the most frequent cause of Photo not re-starting might be another Photo instance is already running. This a another mystery, as photo normally refuses to be started more than once. 

My guess has been (for cases where I don't find a crash report) that it can take some amount of time for Photo to actually quit in some cases. It may dispose of the UI, which makes it seem like it has quit, but it's still in the process of completely going away when the "Start" function is called to restart it. And the Start function sees that Photo is still there, and doesn't do anything, just as would happen if you try to start it while it is already running.

 

[stokerg]

9 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

It may dispose of the UI, which makes it seem like it has quit, but it's still in the process of completely going away when the "Start" function is called to restart it. And the Start function sees that Photo is still there, and doesn't do anything, just as would happen if you try to start it while it is already running.

That makes perfect sense to me Walt.  We used to see that happening a lot with an old Serif app, PhotoStack.  Even tho the UI has closed, the process was still busy doing it's 'thing' in the background.  But with that app, it was normally busy indexing images, which could take some time.  I wouldn't expect this with Affinity Photo, unless maybe using the stacking options and it encounters a problem, however i'm not a programmer so just speaking from the little knowledge i have that would keep a process open on Windows