"Failed to save document:" (this should be reported to the development team...)

[Tearlach]

New problem here. Designer 1.10.1, MacOS 11.6, M1 MacBook Air 16GB/1TB.

Tried to "Save As..." a document I'm working on and got the attached mysterious message: 

"Failed to save document: DOCUMENT.NAME.afdesign"

"Save failed due to an internal error. This should be reported to the development team." (dialog attached)

There was no crash, so there is no crash report to upload.

3 Other files (2 Affinity designer files, 1 PDF file) could all be "Saved As" just fine to the exact same location that my MAIN file (below) could not. The files that worked are 92KB to 450KB in size. The main document is just at 2MB.

When I try to "Save as..." and it fails, it does create a Zero KB file of the name I requested with extension .afdesign in the folder. Attempting to open that (presumably empty) file gives another odd error, suggesting that:

"The file is already open in another application." (dialog attached)

I can duplicate the large/failed document in the same folder, so write permissions in the directory is not the problem (or at least not system wide).

So that is a work around, but it is not a good one. 

I see that something similar was reported in Windows Publisher, I believe.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/147767-save-failed-due-to-internal-error/

thanks,

Charlie

[Tearlach]

Quick follow up. I am able to "Export" the file as a PDF. It was very slow, and it created a PDF that was awfully slow to open in Preview on MacOS, but it did work. It was able to do this in the same folder that it is UNABLE to "Save As..." in.

[Tearlach]

Another addendum, this one much more serious. I had not tried saving my file. I cannot save my file at all. So while I can edit it, and export it, I can't save changes or save it as a new file. Essentially the same dialog error (attached). This is not good.

 

[Tearlach]

Well the only way to create a current version of my edited document that I could save, as far as I could tell, was to create a new document and copy/paste all the content from the broken one to the new one.

That took nearly 2 minutes of spinning beachball to complete the paste (it's only 2MB of data, for crying out loud).  But it did copy.

Unfortunately my very first attempt to edit an element in this NEW (unsaved) file caused an immediate crash of Designer - taking out the application, all my recent changes (the recovery file was older than the last successful save), and the new file entirely.  I'm essentially starting my morning's work over again.

I am not pleased. I did not have a single Affinity crash up to 1.9.x. I have essentially been unable to use Photo or Designer 1.10.x in either Windows are MacOS for any practical purpose. The entire fork seems to be in beta.

At least I have a crash report for you now.

Affinity Designer_2021-09-14-141815_MacBook-Air.crash

[Tearlach]

Last one. I hope. But an interesting footnote.

The hard crash fixed the problem with "Save As..." with that file.  I can now save it (and all the others) just as one would expect.

That suggests that the problem is not with the file itself (even though it only appeared with the one file), but with something buried in the running application code & data.

Have yourselves some fun with that.  I'm having a coffee.

[Tearlach]

I knew it couldn't really be fixed. New error (but only a slight modification on the previous save as problem).

This time on regular "Save" (of a different fork of the large file I had opened) it failed, but offered to let me "Save As..."

That also failed with the same error, putting it into and endless loop of failing and offering to "Save As..."

The only solution I have so far is to save my file after almost any edit - and as soon as it fails to save (of late, it always does) I Quit Designer and reopen the file. It will then be fine for an unpredictable period of time.

This is not a large file, but it does have a large number of nested layers and groups - as well as a couple or three 'symbols'. So far only the 'large' (2MB) files I'm working with have had the issue.

 

[Tearlach]

This purely a "I hope this helps someone else save some work." addendum.

I discovered (perhaps it's no surprise to others) that if I export the file as an SVG format (which it will still do for me, even when it's refusing to save or save-as a designer document), the file preserves the layers and groups. I knew it was a vector format, but I didn't realise it kept all the metadata. Excellent!

You only get your visible layers in the export, as far as I can tell - so turn everything on that you are trying to save!

It also converts the document size/scale to pixels... which is a bit of a bore. (so my drawing is now about 100,000 px by 200,000 px)

But I was able to save the work I was otherwise about to lose, because it eff-ing did it again, and I'd gotten complacent and not saved things for about 4-5 edits.

[Sean P]

Hi Tearlach,

Do you have a copy of the original document you would open that would refuse to save? Does that document have Save History enabled at all? If so does disabling that allow you to then save correctly?

We've discovered an issue that causes a document to fail to save with the same error message using the following steps:

1. Create Object and group it
2. Enable Save History with Document (without this it will not be reproducible)
3. File > Save As
4. Layer > Promote Group to Layer
5. File > Save

That would explain why copying to a new document would work (until you re-enable Save History and repeat the offending command).

Does 'Promote Group to Layer' sound like an option you would have used? It sounds like there is a command you're doing that is then refusing to save! Can you remember the steps you took between opening the file (or your last save) and then the save error appearing? If so can you try to reproduce the error by repeating the same steps?

If you are, could you attach the document you opened and a video showing the steps. I suspect it could be similar to the above steps (if not the same), but without knowing what steps and commands you were using it will be very tricky to track down.

[Sean P]

Also just to add that the link to the Publisher issue was a different one that was caused by Picture Frames (which is a Publisher only object) which has since been fixed.

[Tearlach]

Hi Sean,

Yes to pretty much all of that. I have hundreds of objects in many, many groups - several of which have been promoted to layers over the course of the docuement's life.

I did recently enable "Save History" because I was trying to go back to a prevsious state and bring back something from BEFORE a change had been made - and paste it into a newer copy of the document. Sort of a resurrection from an error of foresight.

To that end I was both using 'save history' and duplicating the document in the Finder.

The only thing in your list that isn't certain is step 3.  I don't believe I had recently tried to "Save As..." (before the "promote group to layer") but it's possible. if so, it may have been weeks ago. This is not a new document - it's more of an ongoing project... but it had always behaved perfectly before 1.10.x came out.

My attempts to "Save As..." mostly started as part of my recent efforts to consolidate some edits from the history with a new copy of the document... and then after that to figure out how to save the document at all.

But overall, I think we are talking about the same bug.

thanks

charlie

 

[Sean P]

Thanks for the response! In fairness either Save or Save As would cause the same issue (I just sided with Save As out of habit!) however it definitely does sound like that is the same issue you've encountered - especially if you have been promoting to layers! If you do happen to encounter it again disabling save history will allow you to save, but worth bearing in mind when you next reopen the file you won't have an save history.

We do have a fix submitted for it now, so that should be in the next release. Thanks again for letting us know.

[Tearlach]

Thanks for the suggestions. I do have an update, although it may have no bearing on the fix in the pipeline.

I just had another 'new' document (created by copying ALL my layers to a new empty document because I was stuck...) which I had saved several times successfully "with history".

It finally failed to save with the known error. I used your trick - turn OFF history. Save. (it worked).

But then I re-enabled save history with file, to see if it would save the history once I got it rolling.

Nope. That's a BIG nope. It refused to save (same error) and when I went to disable "save history", the file closed without warning. No error. No message. It was just gone.

All I could see was the other open file (older) and it was rendering incorrectly. There were huge chunks of black screen scattered like mosaic tiles across the image.

Zooming out resolved the rendering errors, but the 'new' file was gone.

Using "open" to try to re-open that new file I got a "Failed to Open File - File is already open..." error (attached).  That's not good. 

I don't know how to trigger a recovery file event without an app crash? Not yet sure if quitting designer will release the 'already open' file or not. That's the next test.