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