Layer Bug, Hours of work gone :'(

Support and Advice General Questions
#1

So I was working on a print with multiple icons and I had just finished making each icon individually. I had made each icon on a separate layer, so I was duplicating each layer to have multiple icons to decorate a single page. Then, out of nowhere, I got a pop-up that said that the layer was not responding, and to report the issue. I had the option to abort or ignore. No matter how many times I pressed ignore, this window kept coming up, I couldn’t do anything else. So I finally click abort, and it crashed Krita. I opened it up again, and the file is just gone. NOTHING. I saved it multiple times, and now I can’t find it anywhere.

I lost about 6 hours of work, so I would really appreciate any recovery advice I could get on this. Please Krita, fix this.

#2

Well, I don’t know about recovery, but first check if you have autosave turned on in Settings > Configure Krita... > File Handling. If you do you should have a file called filename.kra~ in the same folder as your original file. If you don’t have it turned on that’s a bad strategy, you should definitely use it. If you never saved your original file, then maybe the autosave is in your temp directory. But I don’t know for sure how that works, also I have no idea where this temp directory would be on Windows. On Linux it’s usually /tmp

For future work, save regularly and also check out how save incrementally works. Hopefully you can find your answers in the docs on autosave.

#3

filename.kra~ is the name of the standard backup file which is the state of the previous Saved content. Ideally, you’d Save regularly so you had that backup file as a recent version of your work.
You need to have your File Explorer/Manager set to show hidden files if you want to see them.

If there’s an autosaved file, as a result of a crash, that will be offered to you for use the next time you start krita.
Autosaved files are only available after a crash. They are deleted after a normal closure, because they’re no longer needed since it’s assumed that you saved and closed properly.

There are many ways to ‘protect’ your work, such as multi-level backups, regular saving, regular incremental saves but you need to manually perform them, especially after you’ve just done a lot of work, or more often.
You can’t save too often.