Affinity Designer: Corrupt File Won't Open

[bionary]

I have a rather large ~181Mb Affinity Designer file I've been working on for months.  There are about 30 artboards in use.

Just today, when I went to save it for probably the 100th time today, out of nowhere I got a popup claiming the file was corrupted and had to close.

I'm working on an iMac and saving directly to my hard drive.

 

This file is extremely important and has countless hours of work put into it.  What can I do?

 

Thanks.

 

[v_kyr]

Didn't you made any periodically own backup copies of that file? - If you spend hours and months of work into something important, you best save periodically that file also as a new named one, with an added timestamp to the filename, in order to not loose all work in such case.

If you are very lucky someone from Serif can maybe recreate and rescue some parts of your corrupted Designer file.

[bionary]

@v_kyr  Not really helpful now.

I've never heard of a file becoming corrupted.  That's never happened to me, not once with the hundreds of thousands of files I've worked with over the past 20 years in other applications.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, bionary said:

I've worked with over the past 20 years in other applications.

Well don't know what you worked with all the years, but I've seen a bunch of such things also for other apps and fileformats. - Affinity uses an own proprietary incremental file format which is sometimes relatively prone to data loss during write operations, especially when using on external data storages.

You should contact one of the Serif forum moderators, so they notice your problem here at all. They can offer you then a link/URL where to upload your personal file for a deeper inspection. Maybe they can rescue it or parts of it (if you are lucky)!

[bionary]

I use an offsite backup service (backblaze).  I was able to get yesterday's version of the file, which was extremely helpful!  It only took me about 90 minutes to recreate the missed work and 90 minutes is a small price to pay compared to losing everything. Backblaze saved my butt!!!

[ashf]

Yes, that's why backup is important... lol