Cannot open .afdesign file

[adissu]

I have several files, I created last year with Affinity Designer and today I wanted to open them and received the following error message.

[EmT]

Hi @adissu

Welcome to the Forum.

We’re sorry to hear that your Affinity document is no longer opening for you. Please send us the file and we’ll take a look  to see if we can recover any of its contents. We would also like some additional information to see if we can work out the cause of the problem and stop it happening in future. To assist this process, as well as uploading your file, please can you also tell us the following: 

1. Which Operating System are you using? 

2. Which version of Affinity did the file last get saved in? 

3. What drive type was the file last saved to (select more than one if needed)? 

• Local disk  
• USB disk/Flash disk 
• Google Drive folder 
• OneDrive folder 
• iCloud folder  
• Dropbox folder 
• Network location 
• Other (please specify)  
   

4. Any other information you think would help us try to find the problem 

We suggest that you check to see if you have any backups of the document available in case we’re unable to recover the file. The investigation process can take some time, but we’ll be back in contact with our findings. 

[adissu]

Hi @EmT,

Please, find the file attached. However, I have an update for most of the files. Maybe the problem comes from the fact that the affected folder was previously stored as part of my virtual machine (Parallels) on my Mac which was running Windows. Later, I copied the folder directly to the Mac. But other files of this folder are fine.

Regarding your questions:

1. I am using macOS Monterey 12.4. I usually update the OS and applications as soon as possible.

2. I am not sure which version the file was saved with. However, it was an officially released version. Pretty sure the one which was the latest version at that time. November 2020.

3. Local disc on my MacBook Pro in an iCloud folder, however, this folder is not synced. Therefore the folder name has the extension .nosync

4. The attached file is not the only one which is affected.
All files in that directory cannot be opened.
If I copy the file to another location it still cannot be opened.
Files in other directories are not affected. 
I also tried on my second Mac to open the files without success

EmbeddedPlatformLogo Kopie.afdesign

[EmT]

Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to recover your Affinity document using the methods we would normally use to recover these kinds of documents. We can only suggest that you revert to a backup of the document or if your document is synced to cloud storage, it may have a File History feature that should allow you to download a previous version of the file. 

We have also logged your Affinity document along with the additional information you supplied with our developers to see if they can figure out what originally caused the issue and if the problem can be avoided in a future update. 

[adissu]

Thanks for the feedback. Maybe the result from copying it from the Parallels Image to the "real" Mac Drive. However, it did only affect this folder.