Recovering Affinity Designer Assets From Time Machine Backup?

[LC3User]

I have a Mac on Big Sur 11.6.5 and the system had crashed and had to be reinstalled from 0, clean bare metal install that wiped my system drive. I have a time machine back up of that machine.  I had a number of unknown software issues (old kext installed) that were causing issues.  I do not want to restore that Time Machine back up, but I am pulling in selective data from my Documents folder, I also have other offline and in the cloud backups, so I have not lost any user data.

However.... I failed to back up and Export and archive some of my Affinity Designer Assets that I have created.  Is their any location I can copy a user file in my time machine back up and restore my old working Affinity Designer Assets?

 

I have tried deleting and replacing the files from my user library from:

/Users/MyUserAccount/Library/Application\ Support/Affinity\ Designer

But when these files are replaced with the same directory from my time machine back up the older Assets in Affinity Design do come back.

 

Is there any option to recover my old Asset data from a time machine backup.

[walt.farrell]

12 minutes ago, LC3User said:

But when these files are replaced with the same directory from my time machine back up the older Assets in Affinity Design do come back.

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

In the above, did you mean "the older Assets in Affinity Design do not come back"?

It's not clear (to me, a Windows user) from what you wrote which files you replaced. For Assets, specifically, you would need the assets.propcol file, from the directory identified in the FAQ below (which may differ depending on the Store you purchased from, and the level of MacOS you're running). You would need to do the file restore when Designer is not running.

 

[LC3User]

These Assets are user created assets not Affinity store bough Assets

 

Yes, I pulled the assets.propcol file over by it's self when Affinity Designer is not running and replaced the one on the new system.  Old Assets did not come back.  I tried again to pull the whole directory from my time machine back up from 

 

/Users/MyUserAccount/Library/Application\ Support/Affinity\ Designer

 

 

Please note that in the  newest MacOS works, it appears application are discouraged from writing to the system library.

 

This path

~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Designer/user/

is no longer valid for Affinity Designer in 11.6.3 to 11.6.5 their is no path for 

 ~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Designer

 

 

It appears Affinity Designer application data is stored in the user library:

/Users/MyUserAccount/Library/Application\ Support/Affinity\ Designer

 

But the application does not want to read this data, but it will overwrite it. If I drop in an old copy of the assets.propcol file it gets overwritten by the Affinity Designer application the next time I open the application, the file size shrinks, and the file date is updated to current.

 

I'm at a loss?

[walt.farrell]

Me, too.

Possibly another Mac user, or someone from the Serif staff, will be able to help.

[Callum]

Hi LC3User,

Welcome to the forums

I can't seem to replicate this issue here at all using your OS version etc. If possible could you provide a screen recording showing you swapping the assets.propcol files and the assets not being pulled through to the app?

Thanks
C

[catlover]

Here's the path to my .propcol files  (Big Sur 11.6.5). I assume you know how to retrieve the file from your time machine backup ?

If not, please reply to this post.

Good luck.

MacHD/Users/Username [your username]/Library/Containers/Affinity Designer/Data/Library/Application Support/User

EDITED : It appears from your original post that you're mixing a Windows path (backslashes) with a Mac path (forward slashes only).
Which of the two is on your Time Machine backup ? 
Make sure you've got the correct path on TM.
 

 

Edited March 18, 2022 by catlover
Original path quotation

[R C-R]

@LC3User, I think you are looking in the wrong folder. Please try copying the below path exactly as shown & pasting it into the field that opens when in Finder you select Go > Go to Folder... 

~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner/Data/Library/Application Support/user

This should show you a large number of files with the *.propcol & *.dat extensions.

[jmwellborn]

@R C-R  if @LC3User bought Designer from the Affinity store and not the MAS, this is how I reach the .propcol files.  The information was provided by @Leigh on October 1, 2019:

Finder>Go>Go to Folder then type in:  ~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Designer/user/

In the user file all of the .propcol files will immediately appear. 

If the user bought Designer from the MAS then your information is spot on.  

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, jmwellborn said:

If the user bought Designer from the MAS then your information is spot on.  

Of course I am just guessing but I suspect that is where the OP bought the app.

[LC3User]

Hello All,

Thank you so much for the prompt and on target replies!!!  Outstanding Community Support!

 

I think I can confirm @catlover was the most spot on.

 

I had purchased and installed AD from the Affinity web store.

 

OSX has been getting picky about where application data is installed/stored/edited pushing more of this into the current user’s library, avoiding the system library.  If you have older installed AD before Big Sur / Catalina your user profile data install locations might be different???

 

From what I can tell AD does not create anything for the user in the ~Library/Containers/ folder any longer, but I did find a set of AD support files under ~Library/GroupContainers/ and from what I see it appears to be some of the software licensing / authentication files but not related to my user Assest files I was trying to get back. I did not need to copy / recover this data.

 

 

With AD closed, copying the “User” folder, newdomentpanelstate.dat, and preferences.dat files from this path in my time machine back up to my new clean mac user path, and I now have all my old custom created Asset panels back.  All is well!

 

/Users/jgc/Library/Application Support/Affinity Designer

 

 

See attached screen capture of current AD 1.10.5 (3/19/22) as installed on a Mac with freshly installed Big Sur 11.6.5.

Edited March 19, 2022 by LC3User
typo

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, LC3User said:

With AD closed, copying the “User” folder, newdomentpanelstate.dat, and preferences.dat files from this path in my time machine back up to my new clean mac user path, and I now have all my old custom created Asset panels back. 

If those files resolved the problem, I think that perhaps you're not using the term Asset as we expected.

Help: https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/pages/SymbolsAssets/assets.html

It seems more like you may have meant Studio panel layout, or Document Presets.

 

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, LC3User said:

OSX has been getting picky about where application data is installed/stored/edited pushing more of this into the current user’s library, avoiding the system library. 

It has done this for as long as I can remember. The System/Library is reserved for the exclusive use of the system itself (for security reasons). Besides, since the macOS is a multiuser OS, each user gets their own individual user library; so each user can have an entirely different set of application support folders for each of the apps they use.

So for example, if you navigate to the ~/Library/Application Support folder & open it, you should see dozens if not hundreds of folders in it, including ones for Apple apps like for AddressBook & Automator, several with names beginning with com.apple like com.apple.Quicklook & com.apple.spotlight; & probably a bunch of others for various third party apps you have installed.

3 hours ago, LC3User said:

From what I can tell AD does not create anything for the user in the ~Library/Containers/ folder any longer...

That depends both on the store you bought the app from & the macOS version you are using.