Saved work disappearing

[LesliePrint]

Working on Mac Studio using OS Ventura 13.6.9, with Affinity Publisher 2.5.5
The project is on an external SSD.

I have been working on a project using Affinity Publisher for several days with no problems.
Opened AfPub file yesterday morning and the previous days saved additions to the document were gone.

Repeated the work and continued adding to the project saving constantly. At end of day, I used Save As to make a version-02, opened it a saw that all was present and correct. Closed both versions 01 & 02 and reopened them and was relieved to see that both versions were fine.

This morning, version-01 had returned to the state it was in when the problem first occurred and version-02 had disappeared from external SSD and two backups.

I had a similar problem with AfPub v1 on an older Mac, but saving multiple versions of the file saved me.

I see from previous posts that some users have trouble saving files, but this is different. Does anyone have any idea what’s going on?

Leslie Q.

[LesliePrint]

P.S.

I do not think it is just a hardware problem, because sometimes AfPub will not Save As to the main project disk.

Leslie Q.

[GarryP]

3 hours ago, LesliePrint said:

Opened AfPub file yesterday morning and the previous days saved additions to the document were gone.

I can’t remember hearing of that happening before.

Are you absolutely sure that you are loading the correct version of the document from the correct place?

3 hours ago, LesliePrint said:

version-02 had disappeared from external SSD and two backups.

I’m not aware of the Affinity applications having the capability to delete files from storage, other than their own internal files, so that doesn’t sound like a problem with the Affinity applications unless the file was never created in the first place.

Are you absolutely sure that the file was saved where you are looking for it?

1 hour ago, LesliePrint said:

AfPub will not Save As to the main project disk

What do you mean by “the main project disk”?

It’s always been the recommendation that Affinity documents, and preferably any linked resources, are stored and retrieved from local (permanently attached) storage rather than USB drives, NAS, cloud storage, etc.

Are you saving documents to, and loading them from, local storage?

[carl123]

Do you have any kind of synching configured, iCloud etc?

[LesliePrint]

Hello helpful GaryP and carl123,

My projects tend to involve a lot of large photographs, so many that the local or OS SSD would soon fill up if I had too many projects on the go at the same time. For that reason I have my projects on an external SSD that is backed up via SuperDuper’s software to another SSD and a spinning HDD.

Aha! I did not know that local, rather than external storage was the recommended way of doing things with Affinity.

After banging my head against some walls and walking in circles muttering incantations, I have come to the realisation that all the copies and versions stem from one original file. Applying Occam’s razor suggests the first file was corrupted in some way and the dreaded lurgy — British English for a fictitious  unspeakably horrible disease; much shouted in playgrounds — spread to the others.

So, I will start from the beginning, groan, with a new AfPub file in a new folder, using the local OS disk for everything and then backup the folder to external disks.

Thank you for your help.
Sunny days,
Leslie Q.

[GarryP]

You're welcome.

I hope that lurgy clears up soon; just don't pour hot chicken soup into your hard drive.