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Corrupted file after save on retail version


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I was making a painting of a creature some weeks ago, but I noticed that the file has become corrupted after a save when trying to open it up again. This is not the first time this has happened to me. I think it started some time around the 2.2/2.3. Smaller files don't seem to be as prone to corrupt as larger ones, but since I very often work on large canvases with GBs of files size this is a bit concerning.

Have the devs been able to pinpoint as to why this is happening? Also, I know it is possible to save some of the work by linking said file into a new uncorrupted file, but it would be nice if the file was just able to open without forcing it to close down.

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This kind of problem still seems to be happening to various users, and I've never seen a comment from Serif beyond "they've tried some fixes in V2" and "save locally, not to NAS, USB, or Cloud. Where were you saving to, and is that location managed by any cloud or NAS functions?

It seems to me more likely that it was corrupted during the save operation, rather than after. And all I can suggest is checking the file after you Save, along with making "versioned" saves, especially for complex or costly files. For example:

  1. Save As name1.afphoto
    At this point, you are working in name1.afphoto but you don't know that it saved correctly.
     
  2. Without making other changes, Save As name2.afphoto.
    At this point, you are working in name2.afphoto, but you still don't know whether either copy on disk is good.
     
  3. Open name1.afphoto.
     
  4. If it opens successfully, the file on disk is good. You can close (and perhaps delete) name2.afphoto and keep working in name1.afphoto.
    If it does not open, you know you have a problem, and can try to work around it before you close name2.afphoto
     
  5. After more changes, go back to step 1 but first save as name2.afphoto in step 1, then immediately as name3.afphoto in step 3.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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5 minutes ago, MEB said:

@Frozen Death Knight,
Assuming you are not saving to external drives, NAS and Cloud managed folders, in what files (.afphoto. afdesign etc) have you noticed the corruptions, in other words, what app are you using to paint/draw? Or are you experiencing this in all apps in general with complex/large docs?

I usually sit in Publisher, but I occasionally swap to Photo for specific Personas. My guess is that it probably happens in all programs.

I always save to external hard drives. One is barely a year old as well. I use multiple software and the only ones I have experienced file corruption from on those drives are Affinity.

This phenomenon is also within the span of a year. The Affinity suite hasn't had a history of file corruption until some versions ago when it started happening in one of the Betas that I reported on at the time.

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13 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

This kind of problem still seems to be happening to various users, and I've never seen a comment from Serif beyond "they've tried some fixes in V2" and "save locally, not to NAS, USB, or Cloud. Where were you saving to, and is that location managed by any cloud or NAS functions?

It seems to me more likely that it was corrupted during the save operation, rather than after. And all I can suggest is checking the file after you Save, along with making "versioned" saves, especially for complex or costly files. For example:

  1. Save As name1.afphoto
    At this point, you are working in name1.afphoto but you don't know that it saved correctly.
     
  2. Without making other changes, Save As name2.afphoto.
    At this point, you are working in name2.afphoto, but you still don't know whether either copy on disk is good.
     
  3. Open name1.afphoto.
     
  4. If it opens successfully, the file on disk is good. You can close (and perhaps delete) name2.afphoto and keep working in name1.afphoto.
    If it does not open, you know you have a problem, and can try to work around it before you close name2.afphoto
     
  5. After more changes, go back to step 1 but first save as name2.afphoto in step 1, then immediately as name3.afphoto in step 3.

This process looks reasonable at first sight, but I doubt it can help.

Based on older reports, files got corrupted due to Affinity is unable to read data from disk, both for rendering and saving the file. So even if the process you describe may detect an issue earlier, I doubt you can do anything with the open, but already damaged file. It will not save properly, and tryin to save under different names or in different places will most likely fail, too. Copy/export will fail. 
 

Affinity needs to add 2 functions:

  • an option to automatically check any saved file (even if this takes 30 Seconds)
  • a self service repair tool which exports those parts of an open or broken file (layers) which are salvable
  • an human readable (plain text) log export like an directory listing giving the full layer structure, marked ok or bad

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@MEB I would highly recommend that the devs program in an incremental save feature for situations like these. The corruption only happens as a result of faulty save states.

I've been able to work in files fine until starting them up some other time just to be greeted by file corruption, even though I can clearly see the data still being in there. It always appears intact only for the % numbers for loading to stop in the middle of it with a corruption error message that leads to the file being immediately shut down. When I recover parts of the file through linking into another fresh file there are clear signs of the Pixel Layer data not being properly saved because of them having massive artefacts with data loss happening. Other data such as Image Layers and Curve Layers seem to remain intact.

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  • Staff

Hi @Frozen Death Knight
Thanks for your feedback. The dev team has been analyzing the reported issues/files and implementing several checks to fix/improve the situation. However, the issues still persist and are mostly related to saving to external drives, NAS, and occasionally cloud-managed data, as you are reporting.
The only thing i can recommend for now (which is what we have been doing anyway) is working/saving the files locally which is far more reliable until we have these issues sorted out. I've been working in a quite limited fashion since the merger and have no way to raise issues with the dev team at the moment, but I can assure you that they are aware of and concerned about the situation.

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Full system drive?

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

My posts focus on technical aspects and leave out most of social grease like „maybe“, „in my opinion“, „I might be wrong“ etc. just add copy/paste all these softeners from this signature to make reading more comfortable for you. Otherwise I’m a fine person which respects you and everyone and wants to be respected.

 

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On your PC, does the disk containing the OS get full during the operation?
on windows, it is usually the C:-drive

If you have a large file which could not fit in RAM when opened, Affinity starts to use the „personal backup store“ file which can grow beyond 100GB within seconds.

 

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

My posts focus on technical aspects and leave out most of social grease like „maybe“, „in my opinion“, „I might be wrong“ etc. just add copy/paste all these softeners from this signature to make reading more comfortable for you. Otherwise I’m a fine person which respects you and everyone and wants to be respected.

 

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10 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

On your PC, does the disk containing the OS get full during the operation?
on windows, it is usually the C:-drive

If you have a large file which could not fit in RAM when opened, Affinity starts to use the „personal backup store“ file which can grow beyond 100GB within seconds.

 

I have 200 GBs of free space on my C:-drive. My RAM is also pretty solid at 64 GB, so I have a lot of space to do heavy workloads. As I mentioned before, this only started happening around 2.2 I think with none of these issues happening before, so I am very certain that it isn't my specific hardware that is malfunctioning or running out of space.

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15 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

I have 200 GBs of free space on my C:-drive. My RAM is also pretty solid at 64 GB, so I have a lot of space to do heavy workloads. As I mentioned before, this only started happening around 2.2 I think with none of these issues happening before, so I am very certain that it isn't my specific hardware that is malfunctioning or running out of space.

Affinity only uses 32 GB RAM, so more RAM is fine to serve other apps or as cache, but doesn’t help for Affinity apps.

make yourself familiar with task manager, and sysinternal suite from Microsoft to monitor process and file system.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

My posts focus on technical aspects and leave out most of social grease like „maybe“, „in my opinion“, „I might be wrong“ etc. just add copy/paste all these softeners from this signature to make reading more comfortable for you. Otherwise I’m a fine person which respects you and everyone and wants to be respected.

 

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1 minute ago, NotMyFault said:

Affinity only uses 32 GB RAM, so more RAM is fine to serve other apps or as cache, but doesn’t help for Affinity apps.

As I said, I have a lot of extra resources to work with and I also keep track of my resources on a regular basis, so I know that isn't the problem. :)

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1 minute ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

As I said, I have a lot of extra resources to work with and I also keep track of my resources on a regular basis, so I know that isn't the problem. :)

That is fine - continue and happily trust that Affinity dev team will reproduce the issue, find the root cause and implement a fix 👍🏽within the time you expect.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

My posts focus on technical aspects and leave out most of social grease like „maybe“, „in my opinion“, „I might be wrong“ etc. just add copy/paste all these softeners from this signature to make reading more comfortable for you. Otherwise I’m a fine person which respects you and everyone and wants to be respected.

 

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3 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

That is fine - continue and happily trust that Affinity dev team will reproduce the issue, find the root cause and implement a fix 👍🏽within the time you expect.

Yeah. Luckily this time I was able to find an exported image of my creature that wasn't too outdated, so I will be able to recreate it without losing it all. I hope the devs can somehow salvage something from my source file or figure out something else about the issue from that I just sent.

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2 hours ago, MEB said:

Thanks for the file @Frozen Death Knight.
Just double-checking: you have been saving it to an external drive - what connection type: USB, thunderbolt, network drive etc?
Are you running Windows?

I run Windows 10, yes. I use two Seagate USB external hard drives with 4 and 5 TB storage capacity with the NTFS and exFAT file system respectively.

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