.afdesign file(s) not supported

[sphinxandcrows]

Hello,
I've been nearing the end of a project, and to my sheer terror, found my attempts to save my project futile (I don't recall the exact error message, but it did say I should report this to you; I did want to try a few things to see if I could fix it on my own first, though. The bullets below depict my attempts at solving it): 

• First, I tried copying over the project artboards into other files (they copied, but wouldn't save as a new project).
• Then, I tried to export my design files into slices/PNGs to at least get a PNG version of my work, but the application unexpectedly crashed while in the midst of this process.
• I figured maybe this could be resolved with a software update, so I updated my Mac O.S. to to Monterey 12.6.3 and I updated my Affinity Designer (V1) to 1.10.6. (unfortunately, it was late at night, and I didn't check to see which update of Affinity Designer (V1) was running at the time of the crash).
• After updating the O.S. and Affinity and restarting my computer, I checked to see if by some miracle, the program autosaved my project before the crash. It appears that Affinity may have saved two .afdesign files, which I've tried to open, but I keep getting the attached error message (which basically says that the file type is not supported).

I come to you now, having exhausted all available routes known to me, in hopes that maybe you can help me recover either of the files I can't open. Help me, Affinity Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.

-Alex
 

[Hangman]

Hi Alex,

All the .afdesign files shown in your screenshot are shown with a file size of ‘zero bytes’ suggesting they haven’t saved correctly.

Is it the case that you can’t currently open any of the files or do you have the file/s open but see that message when trying to save?

You mentioned about trying to save as slices, have you tried to export to pdf, if you have the file/s open and also to your local hard drive rather than Dropbox…

In fact, the files showing zero bytes are shown in your Documents folder, do they exist on your Dropbox as well?