Transfer of Affinity Publisher Autosave Files to New Installation

[betzalel@project314.org]

Is it possible to transfer and recover an autosave file from one machine to another, provided I'm running the same Affinity Publisher version?  

I had a Win 10 machine running Affinity Publisher Version 1 (updated to December 2022 revision) with a hardware failure.  I was able to recover the hard drive just fine and accessed the autosave from the C:\Users\XXXXX\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\[Application]\1.0 folder.  On a new Win 10 machine, I installed the latest Publisher Version 1, and I replaced the entire 1.0 folder with that of the crashed machine.  But when I started up the Publisher application, the autosave didn't come up.  When I tried to open it directly (looking for *.* instead of the normal Affinity extension), it gave me an error, saying that "the file is a linked file but the parent file could not be found".  See the error dialogue box below...

In hopes of overcoming this problem, I went so far as to make a directory in the USERS file that was the same as my old installation, presuming it was a path-based username error.  Is there a way that I can resolve this error and overcome it?  I have the old file that was revised, and that opens fine (without the autosave revisions), as well as the HUGE autosave file (about 1.5GB), but I don't know how or if I can marry them together.  

[walt.farrell]

I think you would need, at a minimum, to have the original file (not just the Autosave) on the new machine, too. And it would need to be in the same location (drive and filename) as on the original machine, because the autosave file contains a pointer to it by name/location.

[betzalel@project314.org]

I have the original file.  It doesn't seem to want to recognize it.  So I added a windows username to try to match the path (which was actually a dropbox location), but it didn't seem to autofind or autolink the file.

[walt.farrell]

No, that would be problematic to recover.

By the way, you should probably change your display name so it is not your email address. You can do that at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/settings/username/

[loukash]

On 12/20/2022 at 10:50 AM, betzalel@project314.org said:

Is it possible to transfer and recover an autosave file from one machine to another, provided I'm running the same Affinity Publisher version?

At least on Mac, if you have an *.autosave file, move it elsewhere, then simply change the file extension to *.afpub and it will open as a regular document.

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, loukash said:

At least on Mac, if you have an *.autosave file, move it elsewhere, then simply change the file extension to *.afpub and it will open as a regular document.

There are two kinds of Autosave files, though. One kind is complete. The other records changes based on a parent file. That second kind requires that the parent file exists, and is located at the same location (path name) where it was originally.

[Pšenda]

3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

The other records changes based on a parent file.

... because only new work increments are recorded in it, not the entire modified document.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, loukash said:

At least on Mac, if you have an *.autosave file, move it elsewhere, then simply change the file extension to *.afpub and it will open as a regular document.

I have never had any luck making that work. I always get a "Failed to Open File" error with the explanation that the file type is not supported. 

This is not surprising because these files are always much much smaller than any files saved normally, & there is very little info in them.

[loukash]

2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I have never had any luck making that work.

Hm, works for me so far. Are you using the files from – for example MAS v1 path ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner/Data/Library/Application Support/autosave/20221222191207.autosave ?

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, loukash said:

Hm, works for me so far. Are you using the files from – for example MAS v1 path ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner/Data/Library/Application Support/autosave/20221222191207.autosave ?

It does sometimes work for me if the file size is comparable to a normally saved file but that almost never is the case. Typically, the file size is much less than one KB, usually only a few hundred bytes.

I have never figured out why it almost never saves much data in these files, or for that matter why any *.autosave files are saved if the app quits normally. Unless the app crashes, normally they are deleted when I quit the app.

[Pšenda]

4 hours ago, R C-R said:

because these files are always much much smaller than any files saved normally, & there is very little info in them.

 

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

why it almost never saves much data in these files,

 

9 hours ago, Pšenda said:

... because only new work increments are recorded in it, not the entire modified document.

 

[R C-R]

22 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

  10 hours ago, Pšenda said:

... because only new work increments are recorded in it, not the entire modified document.

That does not explain why on my Mac occasionally the *.autosave file apparently contains everything in the document, not just the modifications made to it. The app did not crash when I last worked on that file & saved it normally, so like I said I do not even know why its autosave file was not automatically deleted when I closed the file or quit the app.

[loukash]

Autosave depends on Preferences > Performance > File Recovery Interval.
Mine is 60 seconds.

So if I open a document and make some changes, those will be saved after 60 s.
Interestingly enough, even though the size in Finder shows only 100+ bytes, the actual file size is larger:

^ Using a QuickLook plugin here that can preview any unknown file type as plain text. I think it's the QLStephen: github.com/whomwah/qlstephen
You can also open the file with TextEdit or BBEdit to see the "text" content.

So although Finder claims 126 bytes, the actual document contains 1.3 MB of data.
Those 126 bytes is obviously the file header with path to the original document.
If I copy the autosave file, change its extension to *.afdesign and open it, then it is in the exact same state as my modified "yyy" document above, and it becomes 1.3 MB.
If I save the document formerly known as autosave (T.D.F.K.A.A.), it will automagically update the original linked document within, and become "yyy.afdesign" again.

Fun stuff.  

[R C-R]

16 minutes ago, loukash said:

Autosave depends on Preferences > Performance > File Recovery Interval.
Mine is 60 seconds.

Mine is set to the default but it doesn't make any difference regarding whether or not the rename trick will work for me. If Finder says the autosave file is just a few hundred bytes or a KB or two, I get the error that the filetype is not supported after changing the extension & trying to open it in Affinity.

[loukash]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

I get the error that the filetype is not supported after changing the extension & trying to open it in Affinity.

Have you copied the file elsewhere, or are you trying to change the original autosave in the autosave folder?

Can you copy an autosave file and upload it here? 
V1 please, I'm not at my v2 installation right now.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, loukash said:

Have you copied the file elsewhere, or are you trying to change the original autosave in the autosave folder?

OK, I can't see any way to actually copy the autosave file but I duplicated it in place, dragged the copy out it to the desktop & then changed the extension from autosave.copy to .afdesign. I also tried using CTRL+Option to drag a copy directly out to the desktop, & then changed the extension from .autosave to .afdesign.

In both cases the result was the same, a file that according to Finder & BBEdit is tiny, only 171 bytes for the file I tried.

2 hours ago, loukash said:

Can you copy an autosave file and upload it here? 

20221222173157.autosave

What is interesting is in the same autosave folder there is another autosave file that is showing at 1.1 MB & for that one the rename trick does seem to work, at least to the extent that it has several content layers. I don't recognize it as anything I have created or saved in the past so I am not sure everything is there.

[walt.farrell]

11 hours ago, loukash said:

So although Finder claims 126 bytes, the actual document contains 1.3 MB of data.

If you're looking while the file is open, Finder may give inaccurate results. What do you see if you close the application?

[loukash]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

What do you see if you close the application?

Then the file usually disappears, of course.
Unless there were unsaved changes and you click "Don't Save" on quitting, then the autosave file may persist. 

[loukash]

9 hours ago, R C-R said:

20221222173157.autosave 171 B

Yes, this only shows the header and the MacOS path to the original file. I.e. no modifications were written to this file.
But I wonder if using asterisks ** in path name could be an issue? Usually asterisks denote wildcard. Not that MacOS is generally overly sensitive to "prohibited" characters in file or folder names, but who knows how Affinity deals with them, given its multiplatform nature.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

But I wonder if using asterisks ** in path name could be an issue?

I routinely save a great many Affinity documents into folders with leading asterisks, so I doubt that has anything to do with it.

[v_kyr]

34 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I routinely save a great many Affinity documents into folders with leading asterisks, so I doubt that has anything to do with it.

• Characters to Avoid in Filenames and Directories

Quote

Windows (FAT32, NTFS): Any Unicode except NUL , \ , / , : , * , ? , " , < , > , | . Also, no space character at the start or end, and no period at the end.

Mac(HFS, HFS+): Any valid Unicode except : or / and a leading . (full stop) in filenames

Linux(ext[2-4]): Any byte except NUL or /

etc.

Though it always also highly depends on the specific file open/read library routines used then and if these do filter out or Escape specific characters then. - However, generally it's much safer to use "_", "-" in filenames than "*", since certain shell commands etc. would need to have this escaped in order to handle it as part of a file name and not as some wildcard extension!

[R C-R]

@v_kyr, like I said, I have been using leading asterisks in folder names for well over a decade & have never had any problems with doing that.  It is a well-known & frequently suggested way to get certain folders to appear at the top of Finder windows when sorted by name.

Besides, I routinely save most of my Affinity files into these folders so if there was a problem with that, I would expect it to occur with more than just one or a few of them.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

I have been using leading asterisks in folder names for well over a decade & have never had any problems with doing that

At some point there is always the first time, as with others saving always to external mounted devices etc.

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

it is a well-known & frequently suggested way to get certain folders to appear at the top of Finder windows when sorted by name.

A beter way of organization is to apply consecutive numbers as first chars in File names instead.

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

At some point there is always the first time, as with others saving always to external mounted devices etc.

Maybe so, but why doesn't it affect all files saved to any of my (many!) folders that use leading asterisks? There are hundreds if not thousands of them.

BTW, if you look carefully, you will see that for this file the folder name begins with a space & the 2 asterisks are the 2nd & 3rd characters.

14 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

A beter way of organization is to apply consecutive numbers as first chars in File names instead.

I disagree. Numbers are no different from asterisks or spaces in this respect -- all are valid characters for path names in HFS file systems. It might be different if I was frequently using anything that used asterisks as wildcards to access file paths but I rarely do that & I know how to escape asterisks when I do.

IOW, different strokes for different folks. 😉

[Old Bruce]

Me, I am paranoid about naming files. Alphanumerics and the underscore, space, and dash/hyphen are the only characters I use. And I will admit to being nervous about using the dash and space.