Working on a piece last night, I saved it, and closed Krita down. I didn’t save it elsewhere by accident (otherwise it’d be in the Recent drop-down menu); it wasn’t overwritten with an old Autosave file (though I’ve had problems with this feature destorying my work before, there was no trace or indication of autosaving).
Today, I open it up… And that progress I made was gone.
I cannot recall doing anything extrenuous or exceptional. Just a routine save, close, and goodbye.
I feel as if it’s a pretty fair request that Krita doesn’t destroy my work, which is why I abandoned it for quite a few years after every non-.kra export or saved file came out with massive, ruinous artefacts, snuffing out my prospects for commissioned work.
I’d like to at least have some kind of picture in my mind as to why this would happen, so I can make the choice to once again abandon (or continue with) this program, before it ends up wasting more of my time and effort.
Would’ve posted this in the “Support and Advice” category, but I’m not allowed, for what I assume is a ‘good’ ‘reason’.
Since Krita is unable to do what you are suggesting it should have done, namely delete a *.KRA file and replace it with an older version of your work, this is most likely the “classic case” where you had opened the same work twice. We have this case from time to time here in the forum.
The problem with this, especially in cases where users do not notice or have forgotten that they have opened their work twice, is that when they close Krita via “File” >> “Exit” or the X-Button in the upper right corner of the window on Windows, Krita asks you twice if you want to save the open file, the first time for the document you were working on, and the second time for the second, unchanged piece you opened from your document, and the moment you confirm to save this second piece as well, you overwrite all the work you have done on the piece you were working on. And since some people believe that their first confirmation was not accepted, they “blindly” click the second confirmation to overwrite, thus accepting overwriting and resetting the work they had previously done. Unfortunately.
For this reason, I made it to my habit to close my works one by one via the document’s own X-Button.
Normally when something like this happens the following thing has happened.
The file was opened a second time either by accident or on purpose but only edited in on subwindow/tab.
Both get changed at some point while you work on it usually the second one gets edited by accident.
You hit save and save your progress
You want to close Krita but because the other tab is still open with changes unsaved from the start of your session it asks if you want to save the file ( because Krita doesn’t know what to do on its own)
You hit yes because you don’t know it’s the other tab and Krita saves it but because it’s the same file it writes the old state it still has to the file, effectively “deleting” your progress.
Krita close and the next time you open it, it seems like it didn’t save.
Cloud storage folders like Dropbox and OneDrive are also notorious for “restoring” Krita (and other) files in an old state. So much that the manual notes to better not work on files in such directories directly.
The reason you can’t post in Support and Advice is that it requires topics to be in one of its subcategories, same with Artwork
Its sad to read that you had so much trouble with Krita. I use it for 10 years at least now and never had lost a file or had it export weirdly, at least not since the 2.7 Version. The Android version however has file issues but the reason is not exactly clear but it makes files unreadable, not rolling them back to a previous state.
It sounds like the accidental opening of a second file is a likely culprit, since I don’t use any kind of cloud storage.
This is very unfortunate, as I’m certainly not a sloppy/reckless saver, and I’m aware enough to check my tabs to make sure something like this doesn’t happen. I don’t remember getting multiple ‘save file?’ dialogue boxes. Or any, actually, since I always save directly before I exit. Maybe it DID happen, though, and glossed my mind.
It is a shame to think that losing work, even while being careful, could be so easy.
Takiro, I haven’t often had problems with Krita since I returned to it in the late '10s; But the problems I’ve had (chiefly before this time, but not entirely) have certainly been awful enough to be burned into my mind. I appreciate the sympathy.
It’s not like I never had lost progress in the past but when it happened I was always able to track it down to be my fault (when it wasn’t related to crashes or something). But it’s a sad truth that with a software as complex as Krita there will always be some weird issue that will fore some reason happen only to a few users. I say that as a software developer myself (not developing for Krita though).
What I used to do in Krita’s earlier days was creating incremental saves (it’s an option in the file menu) but I stopped doing it at some point because Krita never gave me any issues anymore for a looong time. I still use it before doing some heavy destructive operations so I can later come back when It turned out to be a dumb idea. I belive someone made a plug-in to automatically make incremental saves once every time frame but I can not find it in Resources > Plugins , perhaps it was on another site or just a lose script someone posted as a reply.
Hello