Corrupted File with current Affinity Photo version

[Alexander Rutz]

Dear Serif,

I have a huge file with lots of work in it which I saved and couldn’t open later on. When trying to open it, Affinity Photo says it is corrupted and needs to close the file. Is there a way to recover it? It is the second file in a row to get corrupted. I have deleted the first one since it was not a lot work in it. But this one has.

File is here: https://temp.animaux.de/290.afphoto (882MB)

Thanks for any help with this,

Alexander

[Dan C]

Hi @Alexander Rutz,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble!

I have downloaded and repaired your file, please check this carefully:

290_f.afphoto

In regards to avoiding corruption, please ensure you are saving and working on files locally (ie not in a cloud location / 'synchronised' folder) as this can cause issues when opening or saving Affinity documents. We always recommend working locally, then saving a backup copy of your file to the cloud.

I hope this helps

[Alexander Rutz]

Many many thanks Dan! You saved my day :·)

The file I was working with was right on my desktop folder, there were no network drives involved. Do you have an idea what else could have caused the corruption?

Will check the filesystem of the machine, and the AP version.

All the best!

[emmrecs01]

33 minutes ago, Alexander Rutz said:

The file I was working with was right on my desktop folder

Assuming you literally mean this was being saved to your computer Desktop, this is another "area" of a computer to which saving a file is NOT recommended!  It is not at all unusual for Windows to "make changes" to your Desktop and so any file saved there can be corrupted or even lost totally.

Far better to save to a specific, designated folder on your hard drive.  (Even better if you have multiple hard drives because then you can choose to save to one which is not your OS drive which is most commonly C:\.)

[Alexander Rutz]

1 minute ago, emmrecs01 said:

Assuming you literally mean this was being saved to your computer Desktop, this is another "area" of a computer to which saving a file is NOT recommended!  It is not at all unusual for Windows to "make changes" to your Desktop and so any file saved there can be corrupted or even lost totally.

Far better to save to a specific, designated folder on your hard drive.  (Even better if you have multiple hard drives because then you can choose to save to one which is not your OS drive which is most commonly C:\.)

Thanks for your reply. Sorry I didn’t mention this before but I am working on macOS. The version I used on that particular machine was Catalina, in case that plays a role. I’m not expecting the system to modify any files on my desktop folder. If Windows does that, I find that outright creepy :{

I didn’t have any corrupted files with Affinity Photo on my home machine yet (M1 running macOS 12.5.1), so Catalina might be part of the problem.

[Old Bruce]

4 minutes ago, Alexander Rutz said:

Thanks for your reply. Sorry I didn’t mention this before but I am working on macOS. 

You haven't explicitly stated that you do not have iCloud off. The Mac OSes have some very tight integration with iCloud and files on the desktop may be set to be stored in the cloud. I am unfamiliar with Catalina OS but here on OS 11.6.8 I check my cloud settings often to be sure nothing is going there other than the email for Mail and my Contacts. This is what my settings in the system preferences look like, hit Options... if iCloud Drive is checked.

then untick the desktop after clicking Documents.

[Alexander Rutz]

Thanks Bruce, absolutely no iCloud Drive involved.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Alexander Rutz said:

Thanks for your reply. Sorry I didn’t mention this before but I am working on macOS. The version I used on that particular machine was Catalina, in case that plays a role. I’m not expecting the system to modify any files on my desktop folder.

On Macs, it is perfectly safe to save Affinity format files to the local desktop folder of the startup ('boot') drive -- I have been regularly doing this for 4+ years without a single problem -- but like @Old Bruce mentioned, it is also possible to save them to the iCloud Drive desktop folder, which is not a good idea.

But since you said you are not doing that, the only reason I can think of for files stored to the local desktop folder becoming corrupted is some sort of file system problem, so maybe running Disk Utility's First Aid on your startup disk might show something that needed fixing.

[Alexander Rutz]

Just checked the filesystem (APFS) which appears to be ok. iCloud Drive is deactivated.

macOS Version 10.15.7 (19H2026)
Affinity Photo Version 1.10.5

@Dan C do you have any info on what exactly was wrong with the file? Was it truncated? Bitrot? Do you have an internal tool to fix corrupted files or do you use regularly available tools? Will file repair eventually be included in the applications themselves? 

Many questions, but this incident is not giving me a very good feeling currently.

[Dan C]

No problem at all!

15 hours ago, Alexander Rutz said:

The file I was working with was right on my desktop folder, there were no network drives involved. Do you have an idea what else could have caused the corruption?

Thanks for confirming that for me - there are many reasons files may show a corrupted error, and finding the very specific cause is usually only something our developers can do after investigating the file further.

However, when opening your file in a HEX editor, I can see many of the first few lines have '00' values, which would indicate missing or corrupted data:

As I understand it, the first lines in a HEX editor will show the 'file header', if data is missing from this it usually means the application could not load or save the file correctly and therefore the incorrect (or no data) is written for this section, causing the error to appear when you next load the file - however the layers themselves within the file weren't affected.

As mentioned above, providing the exact cause of this from your system isn't something I'm able to do directly, my apologies. We very rarely see file header errors, and I certainly would not expect this to continue to occur.