Affinity Designer V2 & Affinity Photo V2 - File corrupted and won't open

[Jillypepper]

Hi,

I have recently experienced files becoming corrupted when using Photo V2 and Designer V2. I have had a look through the various posts on the forum and can't seem to find a solution to the problem.

I am using a laptop with windows 11, my files are stored on an external hard-drive but this has been working find. I have other files created at the same time via Designer that are still opening OK (so far!). I have tried moving the files to my internal hard drive but that hasn't helped. The files do contain a number of layers and png photo's (I am making xmas cards for a local animal charity).

The pictures being used are my own and have been adjusted and exported as png's from Photo v2. I am assuming that it must be something to do with the pictures but can't be sure. The pictures look fine separately and I have recreated one of the files and readded the pics and so far so good. There doesn't seem to be any reason for the corruption, the files were fine yesterday when I saved and closed them but corrupted today when I tried to open them.

Can anyone advise how I can resolve this? Recreating one file, whilst a pain, is doable but if this is going to happen randomly to complicated files insanity will soon follow !

I have uploaded one of the designer files that has corrupted.

Any help would be gratefully received.

Thanks

frame_xmascards_blue.afdesign

[NathanC]

Welcome to the forums @Jillypepper,

Sadly your attached file doesn't appear to be recoverable by any standard means (using the document > add pages from file function in Publisher can sometimes recover files) and opening the file in a hex editor indicates that there are large sections of the file missing/damaged, I'll log the corrupt file with the developers for further investigation.

18 hours ago, Jillypepper said:

I am using a laptop with windows 11, my files are stored on an external hard-drive but this has been working find. I have other files created at the same time via Designer that are still opening OK (so far!). I have tried moving the files to my internal hard drive but that hasn't helped.

As to prevent future file corruptions, we do generally advise that opening from and saving to your local drive is always the safest option to prevent file corruptions, for example if at any point the connection to the external drive is lost while you have a document open, this can result in a corruption.

If files continue to corrupt on an internal drive, this can also sometimes be an indication that there is a problem on the local disk, it would be worth checking event viewer for any 'Bad block' events and running a disk check to confirm if the disk sectors can be repaired if there is any present issues.

18 hours ago, Jillypepper said:

The pictures being used are my own and have been adjusted and exported as png's from Photo v2. I am assuming that it must be something to do with the pictures but can't be sure. The pictures look fine separately and I have recreated one of the files and readded the pics and so far so good. There doesn't seem to be any reason for the corruption, the files were fine yesterday when I saved and closed them but corrupted today when I tried to open them.

It's difficult to say for certain if this is causing your problem, it might be worth comparing what image placement policy you're using in future documents (Prefer linked or embedded) and in current documents in Resource manager to see if this has any impact.

In addition, the currently active 2.2 beta apps include improvements to the app's file saving procedure and improvements to how the app handles saving files on external storage devices, so in your scenario it may be worth trying out the beta apps to see if this helps prevent further corruptions, I've provided a link to the beta signup below. Note: Be sure to back up files before opening them in the beta, as once they have been saved they can't be opened in the release apps (2.1.1) again.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/affinity-beta-program/

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, NathanC said:

As to prevent future file corruptions, we do generally advise that opening from and saving to your local drive is always the safest option to prevent file corruptions, for example if at any point the connection to the external drive is lost while you have a document open, this can result in a corruption.

FWIW, I have yet to ever find any evidence of a conventional hard drive or SSD (IOW, not a thumb drive, SD card, flash drive, or the like) that is connected to any of my Macs via USB (or back in the day via Firewire) ever disconnecting unless I manually 'eject' or unmount it manually. Conventional HHD's might spin down so it could take a few seconds for them to spin back up but that does not disconnect them & any app should be able to wait for the OS to spin them back up.

So the only way I can think of for this to happen for such drives is either a bad cable or loss of power to the drive, either of which should generate a macOS "Disk Not Ejected Properly" notification. So if a user never gets that notification & the external drive is one of the above, I have to wonder why Affinity has potential corruption issues when opening files directly from them....

[v_kyr]

36 minutes ago, R C-R said:

FWIW, I have yet to ever find any evidence of a conventional hard drive or SSD (IOW, not a thumb drive, SD card, flash drive, or the like) that is connected to any of my Macs via USB (or back in the day via Firewire) ever disconnecting unless I manually 'eject' or unmount it manually. Conventional HHD's might spin down so it could take a few seconds for them to spin back up but that does not disconnect them & any app should be able to wait for the OS to spin them back up.

Sleepmode and I/O latencity for external drives/network i/o is probably the Affinity problem here.

Further the OP uses Windows 11 and there the before said (sleepmode & latencity)  also depends on OS settings,  possible OS bugs, or the behavior of third-party hardware drives and their possible custom drivers ...

• MS - Prevent external USB hard drive from entering sleep mode
• Prevent Hard Disk from going to Sleep in Windows 11/10
• ... and so on ...

For Macs & macOS it depends too on OS settings, possible OS bugs, or if external drives are instead AC selfpowered or not, and behavior of third-party hardware drives and their possible custom drivers ...

• How to set up Sleep mode on a Mac that has bus-powered external storage
• Apple - Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep
• Resolve Mac External Hard Drive Sleep Problem
• ... and so on ...

So the whole always depends and is also dependent on how the OS settings for drive sleepmode handling are setup right out of the box as default here by an respective OS.

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Sleepmode and I/O latencity for external drives/network i/o is probably the Affinity problem here.

But neither should be a problem because any well behaved app should be able to wait for drives to wake up if needed & to become available if they have not actually been ejected/unmounted.

Besides, if the disconnection is due to a bug in the OS, it should occur with any app that has open files when that occurs, whatever the cause.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

But neither should be a problem because any well behaved app should be able to wait for drives to wake up if needed & to become available if they have not actually been ejected/unmounted.

Should & be in terms of well behaving, meaning here, in theory yes, but in practise no, as the later (in practise usage) often shows something else here among different software! - Pretty much the same as every software which uses the OpenCL or Metal APIs should usually behave well, but as we all know ...

 

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Besides, if the disconnection is due to a bug in the OS, it should occur with any app that has open files when that occurs, whatever the cause.

It does in such cases, if an respective app doesn't cache things locally and reassigns from there then. See for example above "Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks..." problem, which is more an Apple problem.

Further plain M1/M2 SoCs (so not Pro/Max/Ultra based) have partly/generally a problem with USB-C connections & syncs over Thunderbolt ports, here if the Mac hardware went to sleep and is awaked afterwards, many over USB-C connected devices (... docks/hubs, disks, monitors) often don't resync and wake up correctly (... which is pretty annoying).

[Jillypepper]

Thank you all for your responses and for trying to recover the file.

I will have a look at the Beta version as suggested and will copy my files to my local drive, although I do need them on an external drive in case I want to edit them on a desktop (haven't done that yet with these files). My External drive is a Toshiba HDD and it does go into sleep mode but I haven't had the corruption error whilst working on the file or when the file was open in the background.

The instances I have encountered are when I try to open the file after having successfully saved and closed it previously. I also haven't had problems with ejecting this drive, so in theory !, that should effect already closed files. My guess is that something is occurring during the save or close process that is corrupting the file. I have files that are almost identical (different colours/effect etc) that were created from the 'save as' process and (fingers crossed) they are working fine (upto now anyway).

Thanks again and wish me luck!

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Jillypepper said:

The instances I have encountered are when I try to open the file after having successfully saved and closed it previously. I also haven't had problems with ejecting this drive, so in theory !, that should effect already closed files. My guess is that something is occurring during the save or close process that is corrupting the file. I have files that are almost identical (different colours/effect etc) that were created from the 'save as' process and (fingers crossed) they are working fine (upto now anyway).

Corruption problems like this shouldn't be happening, of course.

But while you're having problems, you might like to try a different approach for saving. Assuming you're working on a file named X, you could try the following:

1. Save As X2. This will Save a copy under that new name, and that's the one you'll now be working on.
2. Save As again, using another new name X3. Now you have two saved copies (X2, X3) and you're working on X3.
3. Open X2. If it opens successfully, you know the Save As in step 1 worked properly. You don't know about X3 yet, but I would just ignore it, and close the document tab for X3, and keep working in X2. You can delete X3, or overwrite it later.
4. At this point, you have your original file (X), and a good updated file (X2). When it's time to save again, you can start at step 1, and use file names X3 and X4.

[Jillypepper]

I have followed a number of the suggestions above and am working on my local drive but am still experiencing file corruption issues. The latest file to corrupt, I managed include the page in a new publisher file and found that a couple of the images, whilst they appeared in the layers tabs, were black. So I am assuming this is the problems when the file is saved. All the images are 'embedded' rather than linked so I would have thought the save process would have stored them all within the designer file.

Although I could see the designer file content when I open and added a new page in publisher, I could not save the publisher file. Even after removing the images that were black, it still wouldn't allow me to save so couldn't recover the file.

To get round this for now, I have various version of the file saved (as suggested) which seem fine (at the moment) but then for no apparent reason they are flagged as corrupted when I try to open them again.

Could it be the file size because there are multiple layers with images in? Is there any mileage in me changing the images to 'Linked' and have a dedicated folder for the included images? I don't  really want to go through each file and change them if overall file size is not the issue!!

Thoughts gratefully received.

Thanks

[abf]

Ditto - I have  had this same problem since I updated to V2. I've read  up on all the work arounds which to be frank, if the app was stable work arounds wouldn't be needed. Today was the last straw when I lost 4 hours of work.

Dear devs - please address this issue properly. For now I have gone back to using which is V1 which is much more stable and reliable.

macOs 14.2.1 | iMac - Apple M3 | 16 GB ram

[CPop]

I just had a similar problem for the first time with Designer 2 (v2.6). Specifically, I created Designer 2 files to create simple logos using multiple artboards. These are basic designs of flat colors on a few layers only.

I made 4 different files and came back after 45 days or so and found 3 out of the 4 corrupted, plus Designer 2 is complaining that they were created in Affinity 1 which I'm almost positive is NOT TRUE. Reason is that I made all at the same time. Why would one that works be Designer 2 and the other 3 corrupted files Designer 1? 

This is terrible for me now with a client because those files are very much needed and I don't seem to have ANY WAY to access them.

ERRORS

When trying to open the busted files, I get an Opening legacy document notice and then Failed to open document corrupted notice on each of the 3 files.

See attached screenshots.

THINGS TRIED

• Updated Designer 2 to v2.6.2
• Restarted MacBook M3 Pro, running Mac OS 15.4 (would have been 15.3 when I made the files)
• Copied files to desktop to open (they were archived in an iCloud folder attached to local MacBook Pro drive and the corrupted files had been uploaded/archived for weeks, however so was the one file that worked)
• I have two separate Time Machine drives (one that gets daily backups and the other monthly). On the daily I have many days backups and tried multiple files back to March 11 with same corruption result on every backup files. The monthly had just one set of file backups and they are corrupted.

HELP!

Any help on recovery is VERY much appreciated! Ty!

[CPop]

One correction and two more things tried to my above report:

• "The monthly had just one set of file backups and they are corrupted." I meant that the monthly back was the same with 4 files and 1 same one working plus other 3 corrupted. In other words, all backups behave the same with 3 files corrupted and one fine.
• I downloaded Designer 1 but it fails with all: the 1 good file gets "The file includes features from a later version of Affinity." error and the corrupted ones get "The file type is not supported" error.
• Same errors when trying to open the corrupted files in Photo 2, while the good file will open in Photo 2.

Edited April 16 by CPop

[RobWu]

Try to get the attention of support, as you're SOL here I'm afraid

 

[werfox]

As there is no solution in sight for the corruption problems with files saved on external drives, NAS, cloud connected/synced locations,
I would advise to export any piece of work done in Affinity applications (even work-in-progress state), in addition to the multiple copies way
described by @walt.farrell above, as a PDF (if possible with layers and without JPEG compression nor image downsampling).

So in case of file corruption you will have – as for ADes – mostly a full-vector file with layers, so at least a great part of your work is safe.
And could be probably continued / re-done in every kind of software that can open/import PDF files with less effort than working from scratch again.

For APh that would be a PSD file (not as flexible as .afphoto as text layers would be rasterised) but at least it’s something.

For APub it would be PDF again – with the obvious loss of all styles and many more, but again: it could still be less work than starting from scratch.

For sure: it is a lot of unnecessary additional work (and it is not possible to automate this yet), but at the current state, I would not take the risk of losing all my work in case of corruption. (BTW: I did not ever lost an Affinity file, but it means nothing, maybe I just had luck).

 

Apart from that: I would kindly ask the developers to design and implement a totally new, robust and reliable file format and routines to save it wherever
a user wants it to be saved. This for at least version 3 (if it is ever to appear; but that’s an other question).

Of course, if the connection to an external drive is lost by a power outage (given an external power supply) and/or a faulty wire/connector,
or a file server hangs/must be rebooted – nothing can be done – except for a "Do you want to save the file you’re working on to a different location?"
type of pop up window <- another hint for the developers. (If the file format is not backward-compatible already, why not develop a totally new one, that lacks all the inconvenience and unrelialibility of the current one?)

 

There is still a possibility of auto-restore files available, but I would not count on that.

 

@CPop and all the others, who lost their files: good luck!

 

Best regards

[lucaben]

Being told to save locally and then manually move files to the cloud feels like a step backward in modern productivity. Totally unacceptable. My files all sit locally in a complex folder structure that syncs withtcloud services like Dropbox. How am I supposed to re-create that complex folder structure locally, and then at the same time, make sure that it fully integrates with the cloud-connected portion of the file system, without having to do plenty of manual work? 

[walt.farrell]

21 hours ago, lucaben said:

Being told to save locally and then manually move files to the cloud feels like a step backward in modern productivity. Totally unacceptable. My files all sit locally in a complex folder structure that syncs withtcloud services like Dropbox. How am I supposed to re-create that complex folder structure locally, and then at the same time, make sure that it fully integrates with the cloud-connected portion of the file system, without having to do plenty of manual work? 

 

For that kind of setup, the only thing I can suggest is:

1. Making sure that the cloud service is configured to leave all the files on the local system, not to migrate them off to the cloud completely. This option is sometimes called "make available offline" or something like that. If the service migrates the files off to the cloud you are more likely to have problems.
2. While working on the files, disable the cloud synchronization process, so the cloud service does not touch the files while Affinity is using them. If the service is trying to copy the files while you're working on them, it is more likely to interfere with Affinity operations, or only partially transfer changes to the cloud, giving corrupted copies in the cloud.
3. When you're done with that Affinity session, and have closed the files and the Affinity application, re-enable the cloud synchronization process.

Yes, this is not a nice way of having to work, but it may help avoid damage to your files.

[CPop]

I recently discovered that iCloud allows a Keep Downloaded setting on files and folders. 

Mac: Right-click (Control-click) on a file or folder and select Keep Downloaded.
iOS/iPadOS: Tap and hold on a file or folder and select Keep Downloaded.

Downloaded assets will appear with a down arrow icon: