Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

750 GBytes of Unwanted Photo Autosave Files - How to Prevent & Manage?


Recommended Posts

Looking for help and advice please:

The hard drive on a Windows 10 laptop was almost full, so running very badly. Eventually I discovered that the User Photo Appdata folder had about 750 GBytes of unwanted Photo Autosave files, plus masses of crash reports. The laptop's owner had not mentioned seeing crashes.

Questions: 
1. Have other people had this problem?
2. Is there any way to stop AF Photo doing this, or any AF Photo feature for clearing these files (manually or automatically)? 
3. Any other suggestions, please?

These unwanted files were in the AF photo folder within the Windows User's "hidden" AppData folder, so had not been reported using normal Windows file or storage tools. The files had dates going back months, including today, even though no crashes had been noticed.

BTW. That copy of AF Photo 1.10 was set to NOT send crash reports or to reopen files on startup.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

AutoSave files are supposed to be in C:\Users\username\.affinity\Photo\2.0\autosave

There is nothing like that in the Windows Apps protected/hidden folder.

Version 1 does not install in an hidden folder as far as I know.

-- Window 11 - 32 gb - Intel I7 - 8700 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
-- iPad Pro 2020 - 12,9 - 256 gb - Apple Pencil 2 -- iPad 9th gen 256 gb - Apple Pencil 1
-- Macbook Air 15"

Link to comment
Share on other sites

28 minutes ago, AlainP said:

AutoSave files are supposed to be in C:\Users\username\.affinity\Photo\2.0\autosave

That's only for Photo 2. For V1, the files would be in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Affinity\Photo\1.0\autosave and that AppData is by default a Hidden directory, I think.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

47 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

That's only for Photo 2. For V1, the files would be in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Affinity\Photo\1.0\autosave and that AppData is by default a Hidden directory, I think.

Thanks. Yes, this was a non-technical owner. So it was safer to keep Windows folders hidden in order to reduce disasters. But this also made the problem harder to diagnose by telephone. The owner had used Google to look for how to cleanup their hard drive, but those solutions were defeated because the Windows Appdata folder was "hidden."

Other programs can clear old files, automatically or manually: Eg. Serif MoviePlus X6 can delete its obsolete "helper files." But I've found no similar feature in Affinity, nor any reference to autosave files by searching the Affinity Help.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some options to tackle this:

  • create a shortcut on Desktop to the folder, and let the user clean up unneeded files once a week (my personal preferences)
  • very unsafe: create a scheduled task deleting all files from that folder. 
  • use treesize free once a month to find large unneeded files (iTunes backups of iPhones were my largest issue besides automated Affinity files, and some forgotten video cutting temp files)

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

Some options to tackle this:

  • create a shortcut on Desktop to the folder, and let the user clean up unneeded files once a week (my personal preferences)
  • very unsafe: create a scheduled task deleting all files from that folder. 
  • use treesize free once a month to find large unneeded files (iTunes backups of iPhones were my largest issue besides automated Affinity files, and some forgotten video cutting temp files)

Thanks. I saw your previous post about this when I searched the forum. 

With so few posts about this, some during Betas, I was wondering whether there is a specific reason for problems with this particular Windows laptop? It has a modest i3 CPU, and is several years old. The owner frequently works with large (80MByte) scanned TIFF files stored on external USB hard drives, tweaking them and exporting as JPEGs.

Windows usually warns if the PC is shut down while a program is running or if an external hard drive is still busy, but perhaps AF Photo takes time to tidy up after working on these large TIFFs?

Serif / Affinity should not expect it customers to delve into the Windows Appdata file. So if this is a widespread problem, the Affinity programs should provide a way to clean up obsolete files.

Having failed to help diagnose the reason for the "full hard drive" by telephone, I'd feared that the laptop or at least its hard drive needed replacing. Have other (non technical) Affinity customers fallen into this trap?

I've bought them a copy of Affinity 2, hoping the laptop meets its specs. We'll see whether the problem happens again. At least we now know where to look.

Thanks to everyone who has answered.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Richard S said:

BTW. That copy of AF Photo 1.10 was set to NOT send crash reports or to reopen files on startup.

Well then I'm not surpriced that the laptop's owner (...probably a more unexperienced computer user?) didn't realized that his disk space is continuously filled with from apps stemming backup data here. - Though there are of course a bunch of third party apps, which do assist and can determine (...hunting after disk space hogs) where all the disk space is wasted unnecessarily and gone.

Basically I would follow @NotMyFault's above advice here. - But personally I would fine tune it to auto monitor the coresponding autosave folder when it exceeds some predefined size. The later can also be implemented very well using Windows on-board tools, i.e. Windows Powershell.

For example creating some PSscript like this, which warns via Email if the autosave folder size exceeds some predefined size ...

$startFolder = "C:\Users\#username#\.affinity\Photo\2.0\autosave";

$totalSize = 0;

...
$colItems = Get-ChildItem $startFolder
foreach ($i in $colItems)
{
    $subFolderItems = Get-ChildItem $i.FullName -recurse -force | Where-Object {$_.PSIsContainer -eq $false} | Measure-Object -property Length -sum
    $totalSize = $totalSize + $subFolderItems.sum / 1MB
}

$startFolder + " | " + "{0:N2}" -f ($totalSize) + " MB"

if ($totalSize -gt 3000) {

Send-MailMessage -to "theuser@domain.com" -from "PowerShell <test@tdomain.com>" -Subject "WARNING: Affinity Photo autosize folder exceeds 3 GB" -body "#Include a longer body Email-Message here#" -Credential "MailUser"
}
  ...

Such a script can then be executed periodically x-times a day and then informs the user (or admin) in advance via email about a critical size exceed of the autosave folder, so he can react on that accordingly.

See also: MS Monitor Folder

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ideally Affinity would delete the Autosave files automatically. But it's not a simple situation.

For one example: You start editing a previously saved file, say abc.afphoto. You have a crash. You will not be offered the opportunity to use that .autosave file unless/until you try to edit abc.afphoto again. If you never resume the editing, the .autosave file will sit there forever.

And for some of us, that might be appropriate. For others, perhaps not.

However, if you're offered the opportunity to use the recovery file, and you say "no", the file should be deleted.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Richard S said:

The hard drive on a Windows 10 laptop was almost full

2 hours ago, Richard S said:

when I searched the forum. With so few posts about this,

In my impression there were quite a few reports of disk space issues, mostly on Windows. As a non-affected user (and on mac), I never dived deeply into these threads, but a search for "PersonaBackstore.dat" might shed more or different light on your unexpected lack of storage, which is different to the not auto-deleted .autosave files:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&q=PersonaBackstore.dat&quick=1

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

In my impression there were quite a few reports of disk space issues, mostly on Windows. As a non-affected user (and on mac), I never dived deeply into these threads, but a search for "PersonaBackstore.dat" might shed more or different light on your unexpected lack of storage, which is different to the not auto-deleted .autosave files:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&q=PersonaBackstore.dat&quick=1

Thanks. I gave up on Macs in 1986, at about the time Steve Jobs first left Apple. 🙂 (I moved to my still much missed Acorn RISC/OC before being dragged to firms' PC.)

I've now uninstalled their Version 1 and installed their new Version 2.03 so I hope this behaves better.

Interestingly, Version 1 had added 1GBytes of unwanted autosave files, yesterday, without displaying any crash reports, although it had stored a couple.

Thanks again to everyone.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

35 minutes ago, Richard S said:

I've now uninstalled their Version 1 and installed their new Version 2.03 so I hope this behaves better.

Interestingly, Version 1 had added 1GBytes of unwanted autosave files,

Just in case:

• V1 and V2 are two separate programmes that have no influence on each other's documents and system files. So uninstalling one would not help the other.

• "unwanted"? You cannot avoid creating .autosave files, they are part of Serif's decision to handle temporary data. As they are incremental, you may get more than one file for an opened Affinity document, in addition you may get files caused by Affinity documents placed / linked in your main document.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Richard S said:

I was wondering whether there is a specific reason for problems with this particular Windows laptop?

Affinity unfortunately is quite crash happy, for no apparent cause. It is possible that certain hardware / software increases the probability, e.g. GPU and driver, but Affinity can crash for so many different causes (often unfixed bugs of Affinity apps) that it does not make any sense to dig deeper - it is basically impossible to identify specific causes and avoid them.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

31 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Just in case:

• V1 and V2 are two separate programmes that have no influence on each other's documents and system files. So uninstalling one would not help the other.

• "unwanted"? You cannot avoid creating .autosave files, they are part of Serif's decision to handle temporary data. As they are incremental, you may get more than one file for an opened Affinity document, in addition you may get files caused by Affinity documents placed / linked in your main document.

Yes, I uninstalled Version 1 to save space and to avoid the possible confusion of trying to open new files using the old version. I was also hoping that any strange glitch might not affect the new version.

It looks as if Photo Version1 has been creating these massive unwanted autosave files (and stored but not displayed crash reports) each time it is used. I'm wondering whether it's something to do with using the external USB hard drives?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Affinity unfortunately is quite crash happy, for no apparent cause. It is possible that certain hardware / software increases the probability, e.g. GPU and driver, but Affinity can crash for so many different causes (often unfixed bugs of Affinity apps) that it does not make any sense to dig deeper - it is basically impossible to identify specific causes and avoid them.

Thanks. In my simple use on my Windows 10 / Windows 11 i5 desktop PC, I've noticed very few crashes with version 1, and none yet with version 2. Sometimes after major updates, Affinity has run more slowly, but has usually become faster when later updates contain better optimised code.

My main use of AF Photo is to tweak JPG photos for posting on Social Media and my websites. I seldom use lots of layers or complicated adjustments.

When I have time, I'll try my old Windows 10 i5 PC and see whether it has loads of there unwanted autosave files.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, Richard S said:

It looks as if Photo Version1 has been creating these massive unwanted autosave files (and stored but not displayed crash reports) each time it is used.

Again, .autosave files are not "unwanted" but rather a condition to run Affinity and handle its own temp data. Maybe you mean a behaviour of these files not being deleted automatically once their documents and in particular if the app was closed?

Do I understand right that you get crash reports every time you run V1 – but without experiencing crashes?

23 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Affinity unfortunately is quite crash happy, for no apparent cause. It is possible that certain hardware / software increases the probability, e.g. GPU and driver, but Affinity can crash for so many different causes (often unfixed bugs of Affinity apps) that it does not make any sense to dig deeper - it is basically impossible to identify specific causes and avoid them.

In addition to this: My Affinity on a 2015 mac almost exclusively kind of crashes when I want to simply Save open documents though there is no further disk than the 1 internal SSD attached. About 2-4 times a month it displays various error messages as soon I use the Save command ("can't read" / "file lost", "must close", "file corrupted") with an app freeze at a certain stage and unfortunately even corrupted documents of the old, opened, unsaved file versions, which makes me wish Affinity would not overwrite an existing document on disk if it is unable to do it correctly.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Again, .autosave files are not "unwanted" but rather a condition to run Affinity and handle its own temp data. Maybe you mean a behaviour of these files not being deleted automatically once their documents and in particular if the app was closed?

Do I understand right that you get crash reports every time you run V1 – but without experiencing crashes?

In addition to this: My Affinity on a 2015 mac almost exclusively kind of crashes when I want to simply Save open documents though there is no further disk than the 1 internal SSD attached. About 2-4 times a month it displays various error messages as soon I use the Save command ("can't read" / "file lost", "must close", "file corrupted") with an app freeze at a certain stage and unfortunately even corrupted documents of the old, opened, unsaved file versions, which makes me wish Affinity would not overwrite an existing document on disk if it is unable to do it correctly.

Thanks. Yes the build-up of these large files is a problem. I would prefer Affinity to offer to recover problem files next time the program is opened; if the user chooses not to recover old files, Affinity should delete them.

But no visible crash or recovery messages have been reported. I have not tried matching the (hidden) crash report files with the (unwanted) autosave files so do not know whether each autosave file is related to a crash report.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Richard S said:

I would prefer Affinity to offer to recover problem files next time the program is opened;

It does, if the file you were working on was not previously saved (i.e., is unnamed). If it was previously saved, you are only offered the recovery option the next time you try to work on that file.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

It does, if the file you were working on was not previously saved (i.e., is unnamed). If it was previously saved, you are only offered the recovery option the next time you try to work on that file.

Thanks. But in our usage, once a TIFF file has been processed into a JPEG, it is unlikely to be accessed again. So if Affinity's clean-up mechanism relies on accessing the same file again, it will fail in our usage. 

I can understand that this clean-up mechanism might suit some users, particularly "digital artists" who put a lot of effort into each creation, perhaps adding more detail each day to the same file, but this mechanism is less useful to people who use AF Photo to process lots of different images.

Perhaps that's why my old Serif MoviePlus X6 video editor has an option which automatically "deletes oldest unused helper files"? Note. Admittedly, those helper files are a just time-saving feature rather than a safety data-recovery feature: If these files are deleted, the program recreates them if they are needed in future.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

35 minutes ago, Richard S said:

so do not know whether each autosave file is related to a crash report.

I was asking because you said …

1 hour ago, Richard S said:

autosave files (and stored but not displayed crash reports) each time it is used.

… which sounds unclear what gets created "each time it is used": autosave files only or crash reports?

1 hour ago, Richard S said:

I'm wondering whether it's something to do with using the external USB hard drives?

That could be a possible reason for issues. It was commented various times by Serif moderators that USB drives work different than local disks, especially regarding their mount states respectively accessibility for apps. Depending on the USB drive it may happen that it gets unmounted automatically, for instance if the computer doesn't notice active access, which may happen if the computer switches to sleep mode temporarily or if Affinity is not the front most app and gets set in a kind of an idle mode by the operating system.

So it could be at least worth to test if your issues still occur when all files related to an opened Affinity document are saved & accessed exclusively from local drives (no USB, no network, no cloud volume).

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting, my path to autosave is a bit different:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Photo\1.0\autosave

My system is Windows 10 Pro.

I have saved only one file and it is showing 0KB. I'll pay attention to this issue.

Affinity Photo and Design V1. Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. Dell Precision 7710 laptop. Intel Core i7. RAM 32GB. NVIDIA Quadro M4000M.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, henryanthony said:

Interesting, my path to autosave is a bit different:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Photo\1.0\autosave

My system is Windows 10 Pro.

Yes, from memory, that is the same location. But I've since deleted everything so cannot check.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

57 minutes ago, Richard S said:

if the user chooses not to recover old files, Affinity should delete them.

One more reason of not auto-deleted .autosave files could be caused by an app preference which makes Affinity automatically reopen those documents which were not closed before the app gets closed. If you have this option currently ticked you could try if it helps to deselect it:

871289469_reopenpreference.jpg.f3b273c91ca05a653c97b4d8be68b18d.jpg

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, thomaso said:

I was asking because you said …

… which sounds unclear what gets created "each time it is used": autosave files only or crash reports?

That could be a possible reason for issues. It was commented various times by Serif moderators that USB drives work different than local disks, especially regarding their mount states respectively accessibility for apps. Depending on the USB drive it may happen that it gets unmounted automatically, for instance if the computer doesn't notice active access, which may happen if the computer switches to sleep mode temporarily or if Affinity is not the front most app and gets set in a kind of an idle mode by the operating system.

So it could be at least worth to test if your issues still occur when all files related to an opened Affinity document are saved & accessed exclusively from local drives (no USB, no network, no cloud volume).

I have not done reliable tests, so have not identified exactly why and when these files are created.

But having cleared them a couple of days ago, I was surprised to find another 1GBytes of unwanted files from yesterday's use. From memory, each autosave file was about 140MBytes. Each original TIFF files was probably about 80MBytes.

So this problem very quickly fills the PC's hard drive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

One more reason of not auto-deleted .autosave files could be caused by an app preference which makes Affinity automatically reopen those documents which were not closed before the app gets closed. If you have this option currently ticked you could try if it helps to deselect it:

871289469_reopenpreference.jpg.f3b273c91ca05a653c97b4d8be68b18d.jpg

Thanks. I believe that Affinity was NOT set to reopen documents on startup.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.