“Failed to open document” “The file appears to be corrupted"

[andy-in-mke]

macOS Mojave
Affinity Publisher 1.7.1

After weeks of working on a very large coffee table book file, my boss, who was struck by the small size of the exported pdf from the original AP file, sought reassurance from me that I was not using a low pdf export setting. I was going to open the file and show him the setting, when I got this very unwelcome error message from AP (see attachment). I was also quite literally singing Affinity Publisher’s praises at the time.  As I write this I am unable to open the file. I recovered older versions of it with Time Machine and got the same message. Weeks of work are potentially gone. Because of the size of the file I'm uploading it to Dropbox and will send an invite to whoever I need to at Affinity Serif (Dropbox tells me the upload will finish in 8 hours). I’ve searched your forums and have come to understand that this is not the first time this particular bug has raised its ugly head. Would appreciate your help with this.

Andy

Edited August 14, 2019 by andy-in-mke
Fuller description

[carl123]

18 minutes ago, andy-in-mke said:

I recovered older versions of it with Time Machine and got the same message.

It seems strange that the backups were also corrupt

Were the images used linked or embedded?

21 minutes ago, andy-in-mke said:

(Dropbox tells me the upload will finish in 8 hours)

How big is this file?

[andy-in-mke]

Yes, it DOES seem strange that the backups were also corrupt. I’ve been working on this file on and off for weeks with no problem.

The images are linked.

The total size of the project is a little over 3 GB.

[carl123]

If the images are linked then that is a common factor that would affect the backup copies

It could be a "corrupt" linked file that is causing the error message

If it was me I would start my investigations by temporarily renaming the folder where the linked files are located or copy the project file to another PC that does not have access to the linked files and then see if the file opens. 

All linked files will be reported as "missing" but that would be an easy fix

[Pauls]

If that doesn't work please upload the file here and we will investigate. The link is private

[andy-in-mke]

On 8/13/2019 at 10:48 PM, carl123 said:

If it was me I would start my investigations by temporarily renaming the folder where the linked files are located or copy the project file to another PC that does not have access to the linked files and then see if the file opens. 

All linked files will be reported as "missing" but that would be an easy fix

Carl,

I renamed the folder where all the project graphics are stored and got the same error message, alas.

Andy

[andy-in-mke]

19 hours ago, Pauls said:

If that doesn't work please upload the file here and we will investigate. The link is private

Hi Pauls,

I just sent you the folder with the AP file and supporting graphics. Thank you for looking at them. Some possibly relevant information:

When I finished the project, and before I saw the error message for the first time, I moved the folder with the whole project from the desktop and renamed it. I did NOT rename the folder in which the supporting graphics are kept.

Andy

[Pauls]

Hi Andy,

 

I can only see the afpub file and cannot load that at all. Did the upload get interrupted?

[andy-in-mke]

Pauls,

I don’t know if the upload got interrupted. My wifi setup here is poor and a constant source of trouble and irritation. I’m not in charge and there’s not much I can do about it. And the file of course is very large. I uploaded it at night and went to sleep before it was finished. The next day it LOOKED like everything got finished. Also, I’ve never shared a folder with subfolders in it before. Do you have to separately share the subfolders?

Andy

[Pauls]

I just see a 308MB afpub file which wont load. Can you try uploading just the afpub file and I'll see if that's different

[andy-in-mke]

Hi Pauls,

Hopefully you see the afpub file. I uploaded it by itself last night.

Andy

[Guillaume.paysage.studio]

Hi!

I am having a similar issue with 2 files. I changed the files names and after that this message showed up :-/

Thanks for your help. I hope you can recover something.

 

[Pauls]

@andy-in-mke I'm afraid the document is unrecoverable. We sometimes see these kind of errors on cloud connected drives - at the moment it's best to not edit files in these folders

[garrettm30]

3 hours ago, Pauls said:

@andy-in-mke I'm afraid the document is unrecoverable. We sometimes see these kind of errors on cloud connected drives - at the moment it's best to not edit files in these folders

Having looked at the file, you can see more than we can, so I may have missed something (or maybe I missed something in the thread, which is always a possibility). From what I can gather in this thread, Andy's file did not seem to be stored on a cloud connected drive. In the original post, it appears to have been saved to his desktop.

On the other hand, Guillaume, who posted most recently, did save to Goole Drive. Were you maybe meaning to reply to him?

[andy-in-mke]

 

11 hours ago, Pauls said:

@andy-in-mke I'm afraid the document is unrecoverable. We sometimes see these kind of errors on cloud connected drives - at the moment it's best to not edit files in these folders

I did not save the file to the cloud until after the corruption problem arose. Prior to that it was in a folder on my desktop. Thank you for looking at it. Not sure what I’ll be doing at this point. I am actually seriously considering rebuilding it. I have pdf exports from it that I can use for that purpose. If I rebuild it, one thing I’ll do is rasterize any imported objects on which I used AP’s tools (which I love by the way, but many of them didn’t print out properly at the service bureau we use -- there are tons of them in the file, and I suspect they may also have been a factor in the file corruption).