Mystery of lost document

[ChristopherTD]

I seem to have lost a drawing I made on my iPad on Tuesday morning and another drawing has reverted to an earlier point in its life. I didn't do anything knowingly to these documents, and just wondered if this is just me doing something odd with history, or perhaps there are situations where AD on iPad has been known to discard data?

To be clear, this is unlikely to be AD at fault, I am merely curious.

I guess it is possible I did something silly with the document that has gone back in time, but I don't recall deleting the other one (I never delete stuff).

 

[Dan C]

Hi ChristopherTD

I've not heard of this happening before and there's certainly no reason that a file would disappear or revert back to an older version on it's own.

1 hour ago, ChristopherTD said:

just wondered if this is just me doing something odd with history

If you scrub back through your history, then make a change to the document, say by moving an object, the history you have scrubbed back through will be deleted as the new step is created when moving the aforementioned object. I've created a quick visual representation of this on the desktop build below, note the Add Curve steps that I scrub back through are removed once I move the object in the document.

This is the most common way that work is lost when using Affinity, and why we recommend always using the history panel with caution when scrubbing back through lots of work.

1 hour ago, ChristopherTD said:

perhaps there are situations where AD on iPad has been known to discard data?

Outside of very rare install/upgrade issues, I've not known this to happen before. This could be the app clearing some cache if the iPad is running low on space. Could you please check through your iOS settings to see if your iPads internal storage is almost full?

Another possibility is due to Cloud storage, are you files saved locally or on the Cloud? There could have been an issue either uploading or downloading the file from the Cloud, which caused one document to disappear and another to revert to an early saved version of the file, however this is mostly speculation as I haven't seen this issue before!

[ChristopherTD]

It is possible the history was the reason I lost some state. 

The missing document could have been overwritten perhaps. I was working in a hotel with poor WiFi but that may be a red herring. Anyway I will watch carefully for a while. 

 

[ChristopherTD]

I have 20+ GB free on 128GB iPad Pro so that shouldn’t be a factor. AFAIK it’s only storing the documents on the iPad. But I think I just have a gazillion documents “open”, and perhaps they are supposed to be saved explicitly somewhere?

 

 

[DM1]

It’s always wise to backup files that you would not like to lose. Personally I like to use the save project function after making significant changes. That way I have the original project in Designer 'sandbox' and a backup saved on my iPad (usually in a nested AD projects folder created in Documents (by Readdle). If for some reason I lose a project in AD, I can reload a recent copy from Documents folder. It’s a same this 'backup' of project folders can't be automated. 

[Dan C]

17 hours ago, ChristopherTD said:

I have 20+ GB free on 128GB iPad Pro so that shouldn’t be a factor

I agree, this is no issue and so your files certainly shouldn't be getting lost. Open documents are saved within the app as data, but not saved as physical .afdesign files on the iPad, which can be transferred to a desktop for further work or backed up. The app should never remove any open documents, whether they've been saved manually or not, but as DM1 has mentioned it's always good practice to do this, just in case.

If you find this happens again then let us know and we'll do our best to try and get to the bottom of this, but due to the limited nature of this issue, I'm certainly hopeful that it won't happen again