Publisher V2 File Corruption on ipad

[Rodney_Dalton]

Hey all, first time poster here. 

I just started using the Affinity suite. I graduated from my design program back in May, and up to that point had only used the Adobe suite. My new job however, uses Affinity. Which I'm fine with. I really like the software so far and the philosophy Serif has for licensing their software. I do all my work on an M4 Ipad pro. Something I got for myself as a graduation gift. It's also my first ever Apple device, so this whole thing is a very new experience to me. 

Today, I was working on creating a template for our companies digital marketing. The file used all three softwares in tandem, Designer, Publisher and Photo. I closed out of it to go look for some fonts on Google fonts. When I tried to open the file again, Publisher just kept crashing. Sadly, my file got corrupted I'm pretty sure. Why or how? I don't know. The file I saved on my ipad wont open. And the file Affinity automatically saves to on icloud won't open. From what I've read, I'm SOL here. I'm not too mad, I didn't loose too much work. But I'm for annoyed and nervous about using Publisher in the future if I can't figure out a good way to backup my files and prevent this. 

Here are my questions. What is the app's sandbox? This kept popping up in everything I was reading. It's corrupted in the sandbox. I don't know what this is and I'd like to so I can maybe troubleshoot it in the future. How do I best backup my files? From what I've read, this is a problem with the version of the file saved in Affinity itself, however, my copy of the file outside of Affinity also wont open. Or, at least I believe it's outside Affinity. How do other ipad users backup their files? My first thought is an external drive, but I read working off an external drive in Affinity causes a lot of problems. Is this still the case? How often does this happen to other people? If this is a monthly occurrence that's gonna be a problem, especially when I get into more complex projects like designing large brochures. 

Any help and advice is greatly appreciated. 

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Affinity forums.

The Sandbox is an internal set of data maintained by the application, and hidden from you by iPadOS. You can think of it, for the purposes of your question, as everything that is in Live Docs in each of the Affinity V2 apps. The data there is not necessarily in the "real" file system, and is not necessarily connected in any way to the contents of any files in the real file system.

You can also think of it as similar to having multiple files open at the same time in a desktop application.

Unless you have done a Save operation from Live Docs, the data is not really safe, and is not anywhere that you can get to it outside of the application.

You should Save files on your iPad, and ideally not in a location that is managed by iCloud or other cloud service. Also not in the folders in "On My iPad" that may have been created automatically by the application or OS and named, e.g.,  Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer or Affinity Publisher. You should save them in folders you create.

You could then Close them from Live Docs.

If your iPad doesn't have sufficient storage, you could then move them onto an external drive, or NAS, or cloud-based storage. Then when you want to work on them, retrieve them to your iPad to Open them.

Really, they should be safe in Live Docs, but iPadOS makes that risky. It can decide to close an application, for example, if you've switched to a different one to do some work. And when that happens, you can't be sure that the application will be given enough time to write all the necessary data to the sandbox copy of the file. Or to finish writing it, so the sandbox version isn't corrupted. Or you might Close an app while it's still trying to write the last data to the file, and cause corruption.