Surprise at being offered a recovery file by Affinity Designer

[William Overington]

Yesterday I generated some artwork in Affinity Designer.

I saved the file as I went along.

When I had got in electronic form the idea that I had in my mind, I exported a png file at one third size in both axes (so a ninth of the area) and posted it in the Share your work section.

Loking at what i produced is probably not relevant to the question in this post, but for completeness, here is a link to the thread.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/163212-art-and-a-poem-using-language-independent-glyphs/

So earlier this evening I decided to produce a full size jpg version (so as to inspect it and if fine get a hardcopy greetings card made featuring the artwork).

However, when I opened the file I was offerd a recovery file.

This is not the first time this has happened, not with this project, but with other projects.

So I accepted and saved as an .afdesign file with a new name (in fact, as before but _recovey file_added.

The artwork seems the same in both files, though that without detailed checking.

So my question please is as follows.

Does exporting a png file where one alters the size of the exported image or one alters anything about the export get regarded as changing the file, even if the artwork itself has not been altered since saving before the exporting dialogue was entered?

William

 

 

[Guest]

I routinely get prompts for recovery files in all of the Affinity apps. I'm not sure what causes it as the files are always saved before I quit, I tend to close all documents before I quit, and the app itself doesn't appear to have crashed. It always makes me a little nervous when I encounter it as it doesn't instil much confidence that your files won't be corrupted or suffer data loss.

[NathanC]

Hi @William Overington,

12 hours ago, William Overington said:

Does exporting a png file where one alters the size of the exported image or one alters anything about the export get regarded as changing the file, even if the artwork itself has not been altered since saving before the exporting dialogue was entered?

I believe this depends on what you've changed within the export dialog to whether or not the file gets flagged as modified after exporting. I've found that if you save, go to File > Export and change the resolution of your PNG and then export, it wouldn't flag this as a file being modified.

However, If I were to repeat the same steps but instead of changing the resolution in the Export menu I change the Preset or options in 'More...' and then export, this will flag the file as modified as it generates the 'Apply file export options preset' event in the History Panel.

 

[walt.farrell]

15 hours ago, William Overington said:

Does exporting a png file where one alters the size of the exported image or one alters anything about the export get regarded as changing the file, even if the artwork itself has not been altered since saving before the exporting dialogue was entered?

It can count as a modification, as @NathanC mentioned, but in that case when you try to close the application you'll be asked if you want to Save the file. Whether you say Yes or No to that prompt, you should not be offered a recovery file when you next use the file. But you might be offered one if the application crashed, or you terminated it without going through a normal application close.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

 Whether you say Yes or No to that prompt, you should not be offered a recovery file when you next use the file. But you might be offered one if the application crashed, or you terminated it without going through a normal application close.

Occasionally, I get the offer to use a recovery file on my iMac when the app has not crashed, & I have either declined to save any changes to it or saved it before closing it.

I have as yet not figured out why or how to make that happen consistently.

[Old Bruce]

46 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I have as yet not figured out why or how to make that happen consistently.

In my experience the unwanted offer of opening a recovery file comes with Quitting the application with a document open that has unsaved changes. This is after a normal and successful quit, just clicking on the Don't Save button in the dialog. It is not 100% of the time so there is some recipe step that I am unaware of, perhaps after opening a file, or having a few documents with saved changes there as well.

[walt.farrell]

There is also an ongoing discussion on Windows of apparent Affinity application crashes that happen invisibly, as the application is closing. You wouldn't notice them if you didn't look for crash reports and see them there. Perhaps that can also happen on a Mac, and if you intended to Close the application, you might not notice that it closed without asking you if it should save first (especially if you didn't realize you'd made changes).

[Old Bruce]

12 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

There is also an ongoing discussion on Windows of apparent Affinity application crashes that happen invisibly,

I shall endeavour to check my crash logs here on Mac if I see this happening going forward.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

This is after a normal and successful quit, just clicking on the Don't Save button in the dialog. It is not 100% of the time so there is some recipe step that I am unaware of...

I am not sure if for me the Don't Save option has anything to do with it. I almost always close all open documents (saving changes or not) before quitting the app & I think (but am far from sure) that either way the recover file option occasionally pops up when relaunching the app. Perhaps related, from time to time I notice that the per user Data > Application Support > Autosave folder still has a file in it after quitting the app normally,   sometimes including *.autosave files with modification dates weeks or months old.

Also, I have no crash logs that would indicate any of my Affinity apps have crashed dated before I get the recover file option on a relaunch of the app.

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Perhaps related, from time to time I notice that the per user Data > Application Support > Autosave folder still has a file in it after quitting the app normally,   sometimes including *.autosave files with modification dates weeks or months old.

Remember that Autosave files are used in 2 ways when the application crashes and you had files open with unsaved changed:

1. For unnamed (never before saved) files: If the application crashes, then when you restart the application you are offered the recovery file.
2. For named (previously saved) files: If the application crashes, then the next time you Open the named file you are offered the recovery file. You do not get them automatically when the application restarts.

Thus, it is possible that you will have Autosave files because the application crashed with unsaved changes, but that you won't be offered them immediately because you didn't immediately get back to editing a named file (case 2).

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Thus, it is possible that you will have Autosave files because the application crashed with unsaved changes, but that you won't be offered them immediately because you didn't immediately get back to editing a named file (case 2).

But as I have said several times now, there is no indication whatsoever that the app has crashed -- no crash report, no offer to send a crash report to Apple (which in System Preferences on my Mac is set to do globally for any app crash), nothing at all to suggest the app crashed, including 'silently' when quitting, with or without any document open, unsaved or not.

For case 2, occasionally it will make the offer when I am 100% certain that I successfully saved & closed a previously named & saved file long before quitting the app when next I open it. As best as I can tell, there is no difference if I accept the offer or reject it -- the file looks the same either way, so it is unclear what it thinks there is to recover.

Also, typically the retained *.autosave file is only a few 100 bytes at most.