Publisher: Error Opening File

[GZeigler]

On Saturday My cat stepped on my backup power supply and turned it off along with my computer and peripherals. At the time I had a document open in Affinity Publisher; I had just saved some changes to the file when this incident occurred. When I re-launched Affinity I got an error message stating that my settings might be incorrect. I'm paraphrasing; I wish I had taken a screen shot but anyway after clearing the error message Publisher opened successfully. I navigated to File>Open recent and discovered that the list was cleared. No problem, I thought. I double-clicked the file expecting it to open just fine, but got this message: "The file type is not supported." I made a copy of the file and changed the file extension to .idml, and when I attempted to open THAT one, the message said the file is corrupted.

 

I didn't see a temporary file stored in the same location with the original (as is the case for many other applications), so I started digging into the User and Program Data folders. There are definitely some files in both those folders with that date's timestamp, but I'm not a programmer so I stopped right there and decided to contact you folks.

 

The file is only one page but it's a file I use every single day. If I could at least get the raw text I think I can recreate it, but I sure would like to NOT have to do that. I opened a few other .afpub files at random and they all opened fine; I'm sure this is isolated to the document which was open at the time I lost power.

 

What seems weird to me is that the file had recently been saved without incident; I didn't lose any work in the file. And is there a setting somewhere to turn on auto-backups? I looked around but didn't find anything.

 

Can you help? Thank you.

Gretchen Zeigler

Melbourne, Florida USA

Grocery List CURRENT.afpub

[NathanC]

Welcome to the forums @GZeigler,

Unfortunately the 'File type not supported' error is a strong indicator that the file is corrupted to the point at which it is no longer recognised as a valid affinity file by the app. I also viewed your .afpub in a hex editor and it looks like the file is empty (all 0's) so there isn't any data to be recovered. If your file was in the process of saving at the point of power loss this is very likely to be the cause of this corruption. I can only really suggest that you revert to a backup of the document if you had saved any manually or re-create the file, apologies.

18 hours ago, GZeigler said:

And is there a setting somewhere to turn on auto-backups? I looked around but didn't find anything.

There is a 'File recovery interval' setting configurable within the App Settings > Performance, this controls the interval at which temporary data is saved, and in the event the app unexpectedly closes you may get offered the option to restore your changes from this temporary file provided the file itself has not entirely corrupted, but this file only contains temporary data rather than being an entire backup of the file, so it wouldn't be possible to open this file directly. There isn't a way to set the app to automatically save/back up your entire file currently.

[GZeigler]

@NathanC Thank you for taking the time to look at the native file. Thank heavens it wasn't anything important; it's a pain in the butt to re-create a shopping list but perhaps the silver lining is reigning in my conspicuous consumption! Thank you for the quick reply, and Happy Holidays to you and your friends and family.