random crash

[paleolith]

I was going along just fine today, when AfPub suddenly crashed. No message, just disappeared. Re-opened the file (with recovery) several times, each time made very minor edits or even just a selection, crash. Opened again and immediately did Save As, opened that file, crash. Upgraded 2.5.3 to 2.5.5 (Pub, Des, & Pho), same crash. I say same, but it's always after a different sequence of clicks or typing, as though some background process is running and crashes the whole program. I launched with CTRL and checked the first three boxes (or rather, left them checked, as they defaulted on), spent a couple of minutes editing and was hopeful, then crash.

The crash reports vary greatly in size, from 610KB to 12MB. I am attaching the latest. I have also attached the .afpub file, but do I need to attach a package so that others can try it?

Obviously this is really bad since I can't do anything with the file. Well, I suppose I could create a new document and start copy/pasting into it.

I'm running Windows 10 on a Dell XPS17.

38a83eb7-f58a-431b-a580-b09c3eb84a53.dmp newsletter v2.afpub

[Ron P.]

Looking at the Resource Manager in Publisher, it seems you're working off of Dropbox. Is that correct? Serif has long recommended to have your files on a local drive.

[walt.farrell]

That crash report seems like it could be related to Autosaving the document, or to having Save History with Document enabled in the File menu. (But I'm not an expert at looking at .dmp files, nor the internal structure of the Affinity applications.)

[paleolith]

46 minutes ago, Ron P. said:

working off of Dropbox.

I'm working on (off? in?) Dropbox because I need to alternate editing with a collaborator in a different location. If there's a better solution for this, I'm all ears.

I copied a different document into Dropbox and played with it for a good while, no crash.

39 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

could be related to Autosaving the document, or to having Save History with Document

I disabled Save History, no change. I set the Recovery Interval to 2700 (the max) and played around for about ten minutes with no crash. Set it down to 30 and crashed almost immediately. So clearly autorecovery is at least part of the problem. Since Save History seems to be OK, for the short term I can try to remember to Save Often until Affinity support responds.

That fits my earlier impression that something in the background was causing the crash.

That's not the whole problem though. I worked on this document for quite a few hours over the last week, with no crashes until yesterday afternoon, and no config change (that I recall anyway) near that time. I can open other documents, both on Dropbox and local, with no problem, and I see files created in the autosave folder. Until now, autorecover has worked perfectly for me in the time I've been using AfPub -- off and on for about a year.

Thanks, Ron and Walt.

[paleolith]

1 hour ago, paleolith said:

Since Save History seems to be OK, for the short term I can try to remember to Save Often until Affinity support responds.

Or so I thought. Turns out a plain Save command also crashes, and without saving.🤢 I guess I'm starting a new document.

f7e56430-7cd9-4606-9cc4-8f19d769c1d1.dmp

[walt.farrell]

Too bad

By the way, that .dmp file still seems to show something related to saving the Document History, if I had to guess.

[paleolith]

At least it only took me an hour or two to copy/paste everything into a new document and clean up. Well, less than 45 minutes for the copy/paste part, because I was able to do it before AfPub crashed again due to autorecovery on the "bad" document.

I'm better off. I had started a new newsletter basing it on the previous one, thinking I had a lot set up that would help me. Really, all I needed was the one, simple master page. Perhaps having deleted so much content overloaded the document history in some way.

I had to clean up the list of Text Styles, but part of that issue already existed, and now I've combined all the auto-duplicated styles. Much improved.

And I've no trouble with the new document.