Affinity Photo capable of deleting linked Affinity Design Files

[Adubz]

I have seen a few forum posts on this topic, but none seem truly resolved. Most claim that Affinity photo is not capable of deleting files because it has its own sandbox. I've had it happen at least 3 times now that during the linking process for affinity design file while using imported photoshop mockups with embedded files, that affinity photo deletes afdesign file while linking them.

This happened after I changed my placement policy to linked. The afdesign file instead went straight to embedded, which I then tried to change, and then the file was gone from my file explorer. After a restart, the file reported being completely lost in affinity photo as well.

Another thing worth mentioning, the file being linked was open in affinity designer at the time and continued functioning normally until it was closed, whereupon it then became completely inaccessible including from the recently opened panel. Luckily, I had seen it happen before so I quickly copied my file contents to my clipboard and put it into a new file. 

Update 1: I am able to reproduce the issue consistently by following the steps outlined here.

Pretty software breaking bug here, please report if you have had the same issue so Serif can patch it.

Edited April 11 by Adubz
needed to add some more context

[walt.farrell]

Another user has also reported that if they use Make Linked from the Resource Manager, for an Affinity file (.afdesign, etc.) that is open in another Affinity application, and that they ignore the warning message that they will be overwriting the file, the file is in fact lost rather than being overwritten. And Serif have confirmed they can reproduce this problem.

Did you get that message? (I'm curious, because you didn't mention getting one.)

For that user (and my experimenting), it is having the file Open for editing in the other application that is causing the problem. I believe that the correct operation would be to refuse to allow Make Linked in that situation. Until this is fixed, if you get the warning, do not proceed until you have verified that the file is not Open in another Affinity application.

This is logged as AF-6655.