I seem to have lost the "Live doc" I was working on.

[Latka]

iPad Pro (12.9", 5th generation), (MHNK3LL/A), running iPadOS 18.2 (22C152).
Affinity Designer 2, v 2.5.7, build 2948

Been learning the software for the last week or so (just getting into vector graphics and such). Was working on using a raster image, and then "tracing" it on another layer to turn it into a vector graphic.

One of the things I needed to do was import a close-up of the badge on the grille. On my iPad, I went back to the "home" screen in Affinity 2, and went Open -> Import from Photos. I selected "Import from Photos." A window popped up with my photos, I went to the one I wanted, and selected it. The photo was taken from my iPhone 16 Pro Max (MYWA3LL/A), running iOS 18.2 (22C152). Looking at the photo, it is in RAW format. 4032 x 3024, 12MP @ 21.9 MB.

The screen went dark, and I had a smaller screen centered that showed me something like "importing image" with a spinning wheel of lines. That screen persisted for what I believe was a good two minutes. At that point, the "imporating image" was still going, but I swiped up to get back to my "desktop." I then went back into Designer 2, and the live doc was the grille picture i wanted to import. I opened that, and only found that image as a single layer. The previous "live doc" was nowhere to be found.

In the grand scope of things, I can recreate what I seem to have lost, but I've probably got a good 15-20 hours of learning / drawing into it, so it's a blow that I don't need right now.

Any chance of recovering that? Does the software auto-save, or is that something I have to trigger?

Included is a photo of the progress I was making.

Thank you,
Andy

[NathanC]

Hi @Latka welcome to the forums and apologies for the delayed response, 

The 'Live docs' menu stores files in a sandboxed area which isn't accessible due to iOS restrictions. Modifying documents and then returning to the home screen saves the changes back to the document within the sandbox, but the file won't be locally saved anywhere accessible on your iPad storage I'm afraid. Moving forward It is a good idea to save your document out to your iPad storage via the home screen (... at the top right-hand corner) so that there is an external copy of your file that can be reverted to in the event anything goes wrong.

It may be possible to recover the file by following the steps provided, but this will require access to a desktop and isn't guaranteed:

1. Download iMazing (only the free trial is needed) https://imazing.com/ 
2. Connect your iPad to your computer
3. Make a backup of the iPad through iMazing
4. In the top right click the iPad's name and select the backup you've just made
5. Inside the folder Apps > Affinity Designer 2 > Library > Application Support > com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2.ios >
6. Drag the Autosave folder to your desktop (iMazing trial allows 10 drag operations, so doing the folder will get all files exported at once)
7. Rename the files inside this folder from .autosave to .afdesign and then try opening these files (if you don't own Affinity on the desktop, you will need to transfer these back to the iPad to be opened, using a cloud service etc)