Publisher file size increased unexpectedly

[EarLocust]

21 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Did you do a Save As and give it a new filename?

Yeah, I did that a few times and it has reduced to 348 MB.

[Jane DK]

Some of this is too technical for me but I recognise my own situation with ballooning file sizes in almost every post on this topic. This is march 2024 and the problems appears to have existed for - well, forever! Are there any serif staff members following this? I imagine several of the contributors on this thread have long since gone back to Adobe. What choice do we have, Serif?

I am not gone quite yet but I am beginning to look at the hours I spend. Here's an alternative budget plan:
2 hours of paid freelance work each month would pay my subscription for Creative Cloud.

I have been with affinity for 3 months and it was a joy to get familiar with the interface (thanks to MikeTo :) but I must have spent about 15 hours on weird problems like the issue of humungous file sizes. The most disturbing fact is that these issues go back years! I realise its probably hopeless but I am still hoping Serif will get cracking instead of wasting time with sales and marketing. I notice there is a 3rd off the license price in a spring sale... What is going on!? "Pile it high and sell it cheap....?"

[Milleniarist]

1 hour ago, Jane DK said:

This is march 2024 and the problems appears to have existed for - well, forever!

I thought this was fixed in V2. I'm working with V1 and I'm thinking about upgrading because it is quite annoying.

Are you having the same problem with V2?

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, Jane DK said:

Some of this is too technical for me but I recognise my own situation with ballooning file sizes in almost every post on this topic. This is march 2024 and the problems appears to have existed for - well, forever! Are there any serif staff members following this? I imagine several of the contributors on this thread have long since gone back to Adobe. What choice do we have, Serif?

I am not gone quite yet but I am beginning to look at the hours I spend. Here's an alternative budget plan:
2 hours of paid freelance work each month would pay my subscription for Creative Cloud.

I have been with affinity for 3 months and it was a joy to get familiar with the interface (thanks to MikeTo :) but I must have spent about 15 hours on weird problems like the issue of humungous file sizes. The most disturbing fact is that these issues go back years! I realise it's probably hopeless but I am still hoping Serif will get cracking instead of wasting time with sales and marketing. I notice there is a 3rd off the license price in a spring sale... What is going on!? "Pile it high and sell it cheap....?"

Just to be clear: the file size of an Affinity file is supposed to increase with each Save, due to the file design, until there is enough "wasted" space to justify fully rewriting the file. You can normally force reclamation of the space sooner by using Save As and providing a new file name.

I mention this because you didn't provide any details, and as you're still relatively new you might not understand the normal way things work with the Affinity applications.

[thomaso]

13 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

until there is enough "wasted" space to justify fully rewriting the file.

Do you know a reason that requires to "justify" fully rewriting – in particular if manually rewriting via Save As is recommended to users?

In an earlier thread a Serif moderator mentioned a 25% file size increase limit as the trigger for an automated fully rewriting, in my experience this limit is not really working.

What would/could be the disadvantage if every "Save" would fully rewrite the file? – In case of saving time: would Affinity generally be able to execute the standard "Save" action as a background task?

[walt.farrell]

52 minutes ago, thomaso said:

What would/could be the disadvantage if every "Save" would fully rewrite the file? – In case of saving time: would Affinity generally be able to execute the standard "Save" action as a background task?

As Serif have explained it, incremental changes are written to the end of the file, allowing both faster saves and faster loading of files. Beyond that, I have no information.

[Jane DK]

59 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Just to be clear: the file size of an Affinity file is supposed to increase with each Save, due to the file design, until there is enough "wasted" space to justify fully rewriting the file. You can normally force reclamation of the space sooner by using Save As and providing a new file name.

I mention this because you didn't provide any details, and as you're still relatively new you might not understand the normal way things work with the Affinity applications.

Thanks for this. Sorry there wasn't much to go on - I should have sent more info.

I am trying Save As and adding a number. First time the size increased then I tried again - same size. Then I thought it might need a change to make it want save something so I moved a bit of text >Save As - no result.

The exact equivalent in InDesign is just 11 MB

I read that many are dispairing about the size of exported pdf files. This seems not to be a problem here. The exported pdf from afpub is around 40 MB which is a comfort although larger than the corresponding result from InDesign (30MB)

 

[Jane DK]

2 hours ago, Milleniarist said:

I thought this was fixed in V2. I'm working with V1 and I'm thinking about upgrading because it is quite annoying.

Are you having the same problem with V2?

Hello,

Yes I'm on v2. There are more details on the thread. @walt.farrell is providing new insights. No success yet but still hoping to make sense of it - eventually!

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

What would/could be the disadvantage if every "Save" would fully rewrite the file?

In the case of standard file sizes, i.e. on the order of hundreds of megabytes to units of gigabytes, this is a negligible effect. But if you work with really large files (ideally to external drive or with NAS :-), then the effect will be enormous. Therefore, this method of incremental storage is a standard technique, for example for database files.
I once requested a feature that would compress a file on demand - unfortunately it didn't even seem to be understood.

 

[thomaso]

4 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Therefore, this method of incremental storage is a standard technique, for example for database files.

Can they really be compared in their aspect of saving new data incrementally only?
When Affinity is saving incrementally only there could/would be more "history" options, not only if manually activated before "Save".

In my impression database files are (or may be) kind of 'folders' (rather than single files), adding new data in additional, separate files (e.g. Email apps).

On the other hand, incremental saving does not necessarily cause the well known issues of Affinity files. For instance 'Lightroom' library files: they are a lot larger on my disk than Affinity files (while both work with linked images) but I don't experience corrupted Lightroom files, neither when saving/closing nor opening. Lightroom doesn't offer a "Save" command, it saves automatically / permanently to its library file, including a visible "history" for each document (which may get deleted manually). Additionally it offers an option to check its data structure when/during opening a Lightroom library file.

Also some macOS apps seem to save incrementally this way: every executed task triggers auto-save on disk while the apps don't have a "Save" command. Another difference to Affinity: these apps store a (invisible) 'history' automatically and offer a restore command for each file even for previous sessions.

So the question remains: What causes the issues for incremental saves in Affinity … which does not happen in other apps? It appears the communication between the Affinity .autosave files and the .afpub/.afdesign/.afphoto documents does not work well: My frequent issues resulting in corrupted documents hardly never happened while working but only after choosing "Save" (or, less frequent, "Open") and on local, built-in drives / volumes / partitions only.

[Pšenda]

36 minutes ago, thomaso said:

For instance 'Lightroom' library files: they are a lot larger on my disk than Affinity files

As far as I know, Lightroom uses the SQLite database format, the characteristics of which are known as "ACID" (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, and Durable), that is, it is resistant to data storage errors. This format uses a similar way of storing new/changed data as Affinity, where records are compressed only after reaching a certain limit of unused space, or on demand - the VACUUM command, see my previous link.