HELP! "Save failed because the file could not be written to."

[Alex_M]

Hi,

 

I was working on a document in Affinity Photo and when I tried to save the file the following error appeared (see attached). Why did this error appear and how do I save my file now? It would be a major pain in the *ss to start all over again with this document if I close Photo. All my disks have plenty of space (hundreds of GB) and I can freely copy/paste files to any location. I'm not able to save the .aphoto document even on the desktop. The strange thing is, I can save to JPG fine, it's only when I save to .aphoto that I get this error.

 

What now?

[toltec]

There are a few posts about that. They may help

 

search for "file could not be written to"

 

here is one

 

 

 

 

[Alex_M]

Thanks, I checked them all but none of the threads provided any solution. Do you know what should I do to successfully save the document? I still have it open.

[firstdefence]

@Alex_M Create a new Document with the same document specs ie. size dpi etc, Copy and Paste off of the layer into the new document and save the New Document to Documents or Pictures, Then close the new document down and try opening it back up, it that works and all the layers and your work is intact I think it would be safe to close the old document down.

[Alex_M]

Thanks @firstdefence, I will try this next time it happens again.

[MEB]

Hi Alex_M,
From where have you opened that file? Was it stored on an external drive/NAS or cloud sync folder? Or was it on your internal (system) drive?

[Alex_M]

I've opened the file from a mapped network drive. That is, an HDD on another PC on the network.

[Alex_M]

It just happened again! I tried what @firstdefence suggested but it didn't help. What's going on? This causes me to lose work. 

[carl123]

This is a well reported problem when working on non local drives and until it is fixed the ONLY safe solution is to work on the file on HDDs local to your PC/Mac then do a final save as to were you want it stored.

[Alex_M]

Save failed... again! I tried saving everywhere - my documents, my SSD, my HDD, desktop... nothing worked. I had to close the document and lose my work. 

[ebbe]

I see this post startet in 2018 - now its the end of 2021, and I still frequently have this problem in Affinity Photo.

Working from the internal hard drive on mye MAC (Currently Big Sur, but had this problem on earlier OS-es also).

 

When I try to save file I get:

"The file could not be created"

If I try to save as a new file I get:

"Save failed because you do not have permission to create a file in that location."

 

So my *guess* is that Affinity somehow sometimes looses its permission to write to disk from time to time.

My only solution so far is to close Affinity Photo (loosing my work), and restart the application, which then works fine again.

 

I don´t like to rant or be negative, but if this issued is not fixed within the next release, I am forced to turn back to the Adobe world.

One thing is the utterly annoying problem that you cannot trust a major software program to save its own files.

But working in a news company with tight deadlines, I can not allow myself to use a program that intermittently forces you to redo your work.

It´s a shame, because I really LOVE the workflow of Affinity.

[sastjw]

You can always save it as a high quality pdf. Affinity lets you edit pdfs so you're safe like that.

[SteveLA]

I have both Affinity Designer and Photo.  When I got the dreaded "file could not be written to" error while working on an artboard in Designer, I noticed that I had to option to open the file in Photo, which I did.  It opened in Photo and I was able to save the file.  Then I was able to shut down Designer and reopen it.  Hope this helps.

[Alex_M]

Hello Affinity team,

I'm still getting this error in 2023 with Affinity Photo 2.0.4. It happens much more frequently than with Photo version 1.x. Every other document I try to save now shows this error. The screenshot below is from a document I've just tried to save. I'm getting a bit fed up with all these errors when saving my documents... 

[MelsB]

I have this problem too. 

Local: MacBook Air M1 64GB 2TB

Affinity Publisher 2, 2.1.0

[guategeek]

I never had this problem with Affinity 1.0 apps, but ever since the 2.1 update I get this all the time. Yes my files are in an external USB drive, but they have been in this drive for months now and it was never a problem before. This is on windows 11 in my case though seeing all these posts looks like its a core Affinity problem.

 

[MikkelJP]

So I think I might have solved this for some.

The issue seems to have something to do with embedded files in my case. If Affinity loses track of the embedded data for one reason or another it will prompt this message, which kinda makes sense because it has no idea what it is saving. While this is sometimes obviously because of a bug, there may still be some hope for your unsaved work.

The solution:

• If you go into the resource manager and replace/relink your embedded files, you should be able to save again.

I have attached a short video to show the process, although it should be quite straightforward.

 

Hope this works for most of you guys.
 

Screen Recording 2023-07-29 at 02.46.15.mov

Edited July 29, 2023 by MikkelJP

[Andrusoid]

I've had this issue from time to time. Today, I went to the resource manager and selected all of the embedded resources and change them to linked files. Oh and first I saved a collection to a new folder in my Publisher files folder.

 

[yokohama_al]

On 7/29/2023 at 9:49 AM, MikkelJP said:

So I think I might have solved this for some.

The issue seems to have something to do with embedded files in my case. If Affinity loses track of the embedded data for one reason or another it will prompt this message, which kinda makes sense because it has no idea what it is saving. While this is sometimes obviously because of a bug, there may still be some hope for your unsaved work.

The solution:

• If you go into the resource manager and replace/relink your embedded files, you should be able to save again.

I have attached a short video to show the process, although it should be quite straightforward.

 

Hope this works for most of you guys.
 

Screen Recording 2023-07-29 at 02.46.15.mov 29.93 MB · 20 downloads

This worked for me. Thanks a million.

[MikkelJP]

No problem. I am glad I could help!

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Saving Failed increasing frequency of reports" (REF: AFP-4826) has been fixed by the developers in build "2.2.1 Release".

This fix is in the current customer release.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Serif Info Bot to notify us