Finding old documents

[gabisan]

Hi,
how can I find old documents created on Affinity Designer?

Are they stored somewhere?

 

Thanks for helping!

 

 

 

 

[GarryP]

Your operating system search facility should be able to help you with that.

The method would depend on the OS you are using but there will be lots of articles about this on the web.

The files you should be searching for will have AFDESIGN, AFPUB or AFPHOTO as their filename extension (for Designer, Publisher or Photo, respectively).

[PaulEC]

52 minutes ago, gabisan said:

Are they stored somewhere?

They will only be stored somewhere if you saved them. The software does not save copies by itself.

[Pšenda]

4 hours ago, PaulEC said:

They will only be stored somewhere if you saved them.

... and then they will be listed in the File/Recent Files menu.

[thomaso]

7 hours ago, gabisan said:

how can I find old documents created on Affinity Designer?

Are they stored somewhere?

What general, vague questions!

Probably thousands of Affinity Designer documents are stored somewhere – while "old" might need more specification.

If not stored on your computer, disks, sticks or clouds a small selection may be stored on public websites for instance. To find those you can try an internet search for a specific filetype by its specific suffix, e.g. "afdesign".

[gabisan]

Thank you, GarryP, PaulEC, Psenda, thomaso,
very helpful advice with the filename extension, I could find some of the documents with that.

In Affinity itself,  "Recent Files menue" gives me only the last 5 saved documents. I cannot find out, where to see "older" documents than these last 5 ones.
Seems, the software keeps only those in "Recent files" for direct access.

Understandable.

Def have to take more care of my storage.
Thanks again!

[thomaso]

4 minutes ago, gabisan said:

"Recent Files menue" gives me only the last 5 saved documents. I cannot find out, where to see "older" documents than these last 5 ones.
Seems, the software keeps only those in "Recent files" for direct access.

In case you are on a mac: The "Recent Files" are managed by macOS. You can choose the number of recent files in System Preferences > General. The max number may vary with different macOS versions, for instance in Mojave it can get set between 0 and 50 (in 7 steps). https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mchlp2724/mac

Nevertheless, even 50 will be exceeded at some point by the total number of documents you create. Thus you can do a search for file types, respectively its according file ending (e.g. the suffix ".afdesign").

[walt.farrell]

34 minutes ago, gabisan said:

Def have to take more care of my storage

You should probably have a standard set of folders that you save your work in, possibly organized into sub-folders to keep related items together.

[gabisan]

Thank you, thomaso!!
Setting the number of recent files to 50 will make a huge difference!
Thanks, walt.farrell.
Great advice!

[R C-R]

41 minutes ago, gabisan said:

very helpful advice with the filename extension, I could find some of the documents with that.

In the Mac version you should be able to use the search field in Finder windows to search for various filename extensions (like afdesign for files saved in Affinity Designer). Just type "afdesign" without the quotes in the search field at the top of the Finder window, wait a moment, & you should see a popup with several choices, one of which will be "Affinity Designer Document" in the "Kind" section.

Click on that & a list of all the files with that extension will be listed in the window.

Note that you also have the option to limit the search to "This Mac," your current user account, or "Shared."

You can also save this search by clicking the "Save" button, & modify it in various ways by clicking on the "+" button, including adding other search criteria, for example so it can search for any of the 3 Affinity native filetype extensions. You can even add one or more of these saved searches to the Finder sidebar.

[thomaso]

21 minutes ago, R C-R said:

You can also save this search by clicking the "Save" button,

Are you experienced the Finder sidebar option "Last used" (or similar in English)? I wonder what it is expected to do. A click on the cog icon let me choose to display the search criteria, which displays a "Logical Expression". Though this line seems to contain neither filetype nor time it finds only 68 items, with a modification date of at least 2 years ago. – Any idea what the line of code in fact says? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreservices/kmditemlastuseddate

[gabisan]

Thomaso, same here. No affinity files in the Finder sidebar.
But still a great option, didn't know that!
Of course, I cannot answer your question 😅.
Total beginner, here, learning from each posting.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

Are you experienced the Finder sidebar option "Last used" (or similar in English)? I wonder what it is expected to do.

In English, it is called "Recents" & for me on Catalina displays a long list (700+!) of files of diverse types that I (presumably) have opened over about the last nearly 3 (!!) years. Weirdly, none of them are Affinity files, which are the ones I have opened the most in recent times.

For this reason, I never normally have this option enabled on the sidebar.

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

A click on the cog icon let me choose to display the search criteria, which displays a "Logical Expression".

For me, in English it is a "Raw Query" & the query string is (kMDItemLastUsedDate = "*") &&. I think "LastUsedDate" is the same as Finder's "Date Last Opened" column but I can't figure out why it does not show any Affinity format files. 

[thomaso]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

(kMDItemLastUsedDate = "*") &&. I think "LastUsedDate" is the same as Finder's "Date Last Opened" column but I can't figure out why it does not show any Affinity format files. 

They seem to have 3 conditions in common, they are …
a.) inside the user's Home folder.
b.) file types that one of Apple's standard apps can open (e.g. Preview, TextEdit, Pages, …).
c.) last opened while this sidebar Finder preference was activated.

For instance …
… it lists a PDF created by Affinity, last opened in Acrobat because Preview can open it.
… it does not list an older .pages document newly moved to the user folder unless it was opened (e.g. with Preview) while this sidebar option was active.
… it does not list an .icc profile even if recently opened + saved with Apple's ColorSync.app

I can't imagine when such a search limitation may be useful.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, thomaso said:

c.) last opened while this sidebar Finder preference was activated.

That one does not seem to apply to my Mac because as I said, I have not had that activated for at least a year &  when I activated it yesterday & today as a test, "Recents" still shows items over this & the last several months.

5 hours ago, thomaso said:

I can't imagine when such a search limitation may be useful.

Nor can I. It could be useful if it did list all recently opened files, including those opened in Affinity & other non-Apple aps, & ideally only those opened over the last few months (at most) but as it is, it seems close to useless for anyone that uses non-Apple apps regularly.

So I think for most of us the best thing to do is just disable it in Finder prefs. It is easy (enough) to create your own saved searches (a.k.a. "Smart Folders" in Apple-speak) for this sort of thing, tailored to include/exclude whatever you want, & optionally add them to the sidebar.

For more about this, search the web on "macOS Smart Folders or "macOS Saved searches." For example, https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/narrow-search-results-mh15155/10.15/mac/10.15 is Apple's entry for Catalina. Another good one is https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/09/12/finder-search-tips-mac/