Affinity Photo document won't open

[gothicus]

Hi there,

 

I finished working yesterday on this affinity photo document, when I tried opening it today to export a preview, I received this error message: 

Failed to open document

File appears to be corrupted

• AFFINITY PHOTO - V2
• Operating system - Windows 11

Could one of the developers try to restore the file for me.

I would greatly appreciate it.

Kind regards.

img009.afphoto

[v_kyr]

49 minutes ago, gothicus said:

... when I tried opening it today to export a preview ...

Where did you had stored the document to, aka your local file system disk, a cloud drive, or an external connected disk/device?

[gothicus]

17 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Where did you had stored the document to, aka your local file system disk, a cloud drive, or an external connected disk/device?

Thanks for your reply, the file is stored on a local (internal) SSD drive

[v_kyr]

32 minutes ago, gothicus said:

Thanks for your reply, the file is stored on a local (internal) SSD drive

Strange that it got corrupted there, on the local drive space, during a save operation.

[Lee D]

@gothicus Welcome to the forums.

The file is also showing as corrupted for myself. I've logged it with our developers for them to investigate but I can't give a timeframe as to when that will be or guarantee that it can be recovered.

Do you have a backup of the file that you can revert to? 

[gothicus]

On 1/2/2024 at 11:05 AM, Lee D said:

@gothicus Welcome to the forums.

The file is also showing as corrupted for myself. I've logged it with our developers for them to investigate but I can't give a timeframe as to when that will be or guarantee that it can be recovered.

Do you have a backup of the file that you can revert to? 

Hey Lee!

Thanks for your help.

I don't have a backup, unfortunately.

I will probably have to redo it at some point if nothing works.

[thomaso]

On 12/24/2023 at 3:23 PM, v_kyr said:

Strange that it got corrupted there, on the local drive space, during a save operation.

Strange but not unusual in Affinity. About 95% of my corrupted documents (local SSD only) happened while saving, often started with an error message like "failed to load" / "access lost" / "must be closed" before a corruption info. Often the procedure ended with a frozen "Save" process bar, even if the document was auto-closed after confirming the error message with "OK". Crashes and errors while working happened extremely seldom to me, occasionally a document was reported as being corrupted while opening it, then it often worked to simply open the file again.

I could massively reduce the number of crashes and fully avoid corrupted documents by a.) saving more frequent + b.) saving with "Save As…" at least once a day + c.) by excluding the Affinity autosave and temp folders from the hourly TimeMachine backup (while I can't judge which of a, b, c has the most impact).

[gothicus]

11 hours ago, thomaso said:

Strange but not unusual in Affinity. About 95% of my corrupted documents (local SSD only) happened while saving, often started with an error message like "failed to load" / "access lost" / "must be closed" before a corruption info. Often the procedure ended with a frozen "Save" process bar, even if the document was auto-closed after confirming the error message with "OK". Crashes and errors while working happened extremely seldom to me, occasionally a document was reported as being corrupted while opening it, then it often worked to simply open the file again.

I could massively reduce the number of crashes and fully avoid corrupted documents by a.) saving more frequent + b.) saving with "Save As…" at least once a day + c.) by excluding the Affinity autosave and temp folders from the hourly TimeMachine backup (while I can't judge which of a, b, c has the most impact).

Those are some really nice tips to work around this problem, appreciate your input

[R C-R]

18 hours ago, thomaso said:

Strange but not unusual in Affinity. About 95% of my corrupted documents (local SSD only) happened while saving, often started with an error message like "failed to load" / "access lost" / "must be closed" before a corruption info.

OTOH, I can't remember any instance in which I ever lost an Affinity format file due to corruption when saving it to my startup drive. I have no idea why I have better luck than some.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

I have no idea why I have better luck than some.

This seems to be a reason for these problems, the causes of which seem to be hardly recognized by the developers and therefore cannot be fixed. On my previous MacBook and macOS, this issue often occurred when I reopened the Mac after a sleep (sleep)* period if I had not saved the document before putting the Mac to sleep. –  *edit: hibernation mode

In my guess these issues were influenced by a communication delay caused in a competition between macOS and Affinity for first, faster access to a particular file. A matter of milliseconds, as if Affinity were just a little too impatient or hectic (which might fit with the oddity of the recommendation or even a need to disable hardware acceleration especially for Affinity.)

[R C-R]

15 minutes ago, thomaso said:

On my previous MacBook and macOS, this issue often occurred when I reopened the Mac after a sleep (sleep) period if I had not saved the document before putting the Mac to sleep.

Never happened for me that I can recall.

16 minutes ago, thomaso said:

In my guess these issues were influenced by a communication delay caused in a competition between macOS and Affinity for first, faster access to a particular file.

That seems unlikely because the macOS controls file access. If it did not there would be a huge security problem.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Never happened for me that I can recall.

As said, these issues obviously can't get generalized. As hardware acceleration compatibility appears to vary between different users' hardware & operating system setups. Or why does multi page documents grow to massive file sizes for some but not for other users or why do they get fixed by toggling between embedded and linked for their resources. Many of those kind of Affinity issues appear "unlikely", not only but in particular those that don't happen to all users.

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

That seems unlikely because the macOS controls file access.

Why "because"? If Affinity expects immediate access to its autosave files after reawakening for example while macOS is busy with other tasks then Affinity may be forced to wait a brief moment to get the wanted access. If Affinity does not get a sufficient tolerance coded it might react with an error message such as its known “can not read” or “access lost”. I even experienced error messages when saving like "file corrupted, must be closed" although I got the document recreated after app relaunch from its autosave file and with the ability to save. Also my occasional experience with such error messages when opening an Affinity document seems to indicate a kind of Affinity impatience when the file opens fine with a second try.

[R C-R]

@Thomasor, all I can tell you is I have never experienced anything like what you described as occurring often for you. That includes waking my Mac from sleep with various sized file(s) open in one or more of the Affinity apps, with or without other apps open that might also require file access.

[v_kyr]

I also didn't encountered that so far, under an old iMac hardware & macOS version (with v1 ADe/APh) on the main system HD. - But I save often and with wise foresight don't tend to use Affinity apps in/during/after hibernation sleep modes.