Lost work after re-starting ipad

[Blibby]

Hi, I re-started my ipad and most of my Affinity Designer files are gone. Only the early junk ones I used for experiments when I was testing things are still there.

I came here to the forum to find out what is going on and it seems my files were only in a 'sandbox'. I now see that in the gallery view there is an option to Save, but there is no Save option when one is working on the open file. I didn't know about this sandbox thing.

Is it normal for all to be lost when re-starting the ipad? The ipad storage settings say AD Documents and Data is using 3.59gb. But it's only some very small junk files that are left. The recent ones I care about are gone. Is there any hope that they are hiding somewhere? I don't know why the junk files are still there as they don't seem to exist in any AD folder in Files. It seems the sandbox preserved some things during the re-start but unfortunately, the wrong things.

I don't understand why the nature of this temporary sandbox and the hard save option from the gallery is not part of the prompt system when using the app early on. I like the app but this experience is disappointing.

Version: 2.2.0.2005

Edited October 16, 2023 by Blibby

[walt.farrell]

5 hours ago, Blibby said:

Is it normal for all to be lost when re-starting the ipad?

No. That should not happen, and never has happened to me. 

Some users have reported that after upgrading their iPads to iPadOS 17 they lost their Live Docs (sandbox) files. If you've upgraded to 17 perhaps that's what has happened to you?

 

5 hours ago, Blibby said:

I now see that in the gallery view there is an option to Save, but there is no Save option when one is working on the open file.

You could Save or Save As from the working file in V1, but that option was removed in V2 as it was leading to data loss and/or confusion about whether data had been saved or not. In theory, Serif was working on the problem and we (users) expected it to be restored to the menu in the working document by now. But it hasn't been.

[Dan C]

Hi Blibby,

Thanks for reporting this, we're aware of this issue and are currently looking into it.

Meanwhile could you try restoring your backup prior to the update to retrieve your documents (i would advise saving these external to the app once recovered, so you can update the app without any risk)

Lee

[Blibby]

Hi, thank for your replies.

Walt, thanks for that info about what is going on behind the scenes. I'm on ios16.

@Lee_T  now that I know more about LiveDocs, I think I can shed some light on why this happened. I don't have a lot of free space. After I re-started, I had 650mb of free space on a 128gb 2017 ipad. I re-started because apps were acting sluggishly. I've since cleared a few things to have about 1.5gb but still working on it. Over the last few weeks (the time period of the files I lost) the free space would have been fluctuating between about 500mb and 1.2gb.

Lee,  (or Walt) by restoring my backup, do you mean the ipad backup to itunes? I haven't been backing up so that isn't an option. I do have screenshots of some things. I was about to do a lot more work so this is a good time to find out about all this.

[Dan C]

Any backup from either iTunes or iCloud, check to see if you have iCloud backing up enabled, unfortunately it's unlikely you will recover the documents any other way.

I would advise some kind of regular backup procedure for the future for sure, something automatic like iCloud is ideal as it's completely hands off and you don't need to remember to do this.

Lee

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "[iOS] Updating to 2.2 deleting live docs from the iPad apps" (REF: AF-358) has been addressed by the developers and we believe it is fixed.
This fix is available in the current customer release 2.2.1
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Serif Info Bot to notify us.