Corrupt Publisher 2 file

[Spartan Steve]

Hi (and Help! . . . please)!

 

I have been working on a book project in Affinity 2 for several weeks — many, many hours of work. My project was saved multiple times along the way without incident, but I have no backup of it. After it was last saved, again without incident, I tried to reopen it and got the following message: “The file appears to be corrupted”.

 

After reviewing many posts on this forum, I now know that I should have been saving my project to my computer’s hard drive, instead of iCloud (lesson learned, but that does not get me my file back).  I also now know that I should probably not have used an external SSD drive as the source of files linked to my project (most of the photos I had linked to my book were stored on an external SSD drive). I’ve tried the “Add pages from file” solution, but that did not work.

 

Can anyone offer any help on how I might retrieve some or all of my file?

 

— Affinity Publisher 2 (version 2.3.0)

— Computer: MacBook Pro, Apple M2 pro chip, 16MB memory

— Mac OS: My project was saved under Ventura 13.2.1, but I have since upgraded to Sonoma 14.2.1

 

Thanks for any help you can provide!

 

Corrupt Pub2 File.afpub

[Dan C]

Hi @Spartan Steve,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums

We're certainly sorry to hear you're having trouble with this file. 

I've attempted to repair the document using the tools available to me and unfortunately have been thus far unable. Inspecting this file further, it appears a large 'chunk' is missing from the HEX data:

This usually indicates the file was not correctly written to upon the last save, or overwritten, incorrectly. The most common cause of this is storing the file in a Cloud or external location (such as a USB memory stick).

I will be logging this file with our development team to see if their additional tools are able to recover this file, though with the above HEX data present I suspect this might not be possible.

Our sincerest apologies for any inconveniences caused due to this - I will be sure to update this thread should our team have better luck than myself with recovery.

[Spartan Steve]

Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate you taking the time to look at this, and making an effort to fix it. Although my energy level at the thought of having to totally recreate this time-consuming project is very, very low at this point, it appears that I should not be optimistic that I will have any other choice.  However, I do appreciate you asking the development team to take a look at it, even though that sounds like it's more-or-less a Hail Mary. Let me know if that are able to retrieve any portion of my document.

Thanks!  And, again, thanks for your efforts!

P.S. I was unable to open your attachment, but I would likely not understand the computer-speak anyway.