I tried to open and complete the painting on my android tablet, that was painted roughly a week ago, and I could not open the file, because every time I do, the error “The file format cannot be parsed.” “Not a valid Krita file” always pops up. I tried looking up for solutions throughout the Internet and Krita forums as well. From what I have seen, there are many ways to solve this issue, but I am too scared to try solve it by myself and accidently create irreversible damage to the painting. I really don’t wanna lose this painting, because it means so much to me (sorry for being emotional). Could somebody please help me solve this issue, that have done this before on an android tablet? Also would like to know what the best and most secure method of solving this issue. (Preferably I would like to keep all the layers and changes in the painting.)
Hello @S011iD and welcome to the forum!
The first, and most important thing, in situations like yours currently, is to make at least one backup of your not working file! Then you can work with that copy and don’t have to fear to damage something while you try to rescue your file!
Now please tell us the exact three digit version number of Krita you are using, also tell us from where you got your copy of Krita.
Which version of Android are you running on your tablet?
Which file name extension did you give your file?
How did you save your file to disk? Or did you believe Krita would automatically save the file(s) for you, if the latter I have to deeply disappoint you, Krita does not save your work for you, Krita only saves files for crash-recovery purposes. But if you have a file, there is at least hope!
Can you make a copy of your picture available to us, or if you can not show it to a public audience, can you send me a download link to your Krita file that you uploaded to a service like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, or similar, or if you do not have such a cloud space, can you upload it to a service like Ufile.io, where you need no account and no registration, and post that link here in the topic or send it to me via PM? The file would be automatically deleted at Ufile.io about a month after uploading.
Michelist
i havent made a copy of my corrupted painting, i only took a screenshot of it. Is it possible to copy the corrupted painting? i created a painting on my tablet using, without a creating copy, because i didnt know that it would be damaged later. Also, the version of krita that i am using is 5.2.8 i think. the version of android running on my tablet is 14, and 6.1 for One UI version (i am not sure if that would be helpful). Everytime i save paintings on my tablet, the file name always ends with the “.kra” extension. I saved that picture on my downloads folder on my tablet. Like I said, i still have the original file of my painting, but it is “Not a valid Krita file” and “the file format cannot be parsed”, meaning is corrupted i think. the only thing i still have of my painting is a screenshot of it. I really hope that i can retrieve my painting back. I everytime i paint, i always manually save it after each brush stroke, which i definitely did for the painting that i talked about.
Please make a copy of your corrupted file. After doing so, go to SwissTransfer - Send large files securely and free of charge and upload the file to that website, there you get a link to your uploaded file. Then come back to this topic and click on my avatar picture, this will show some information, and you will see a blue button on the right side which says “Message”, click on that button and paste the link from SwissTransfer - Send large files securely and free of charge for downloading your file into the text box and send this link to me.
Then I’ll try and see if I’m able to rescue your file.
Furthermore, so such things do not happen to you again in the future, you should get into the habit to create additional backups of your work while you are painting in Krita. You can do this via several ways, but the probably best practice does not exist, respectively you have to find out the way that fits your way to use Krita best.
The first thing you should do when you begin a new picture in Krita, is to save the new created empty canvas after you created it giving it a file name. You must do that before you make your first brush stroke, this allows you to better find it if Krita should crash, because the crash recovery files of a file without an own file name will be saved by Krita to a directory that is unknown to me (at least on Android) using a random name that can not be guessed and will make it hard to impossible to rediscover that file.
This can not happen to you, if you gave your file a name before a possible crash!
The next thing is, when you are painting, you should make backups while you are painting, let’s say 4 times per hour. To do so, open Krita’s menu “File” and here you can select
‘‘File’’ >> ‘‘Save Incremental Backup’’ F4
or alternatively
‘‘File’’ >> ‘‘Save Incremental Version’’ CTRL ALT S
depending on your way of using Krita. I’m using the first option, but that may not fit your way to use Krita.
You could also want to use the “simple” way of constantly save your work via
‘‘File’’ >> ‘‘Save as Ctrl+Shift+S’’
and manually give every new backup you create via this suboptimal way a new name of its own manually. As I said, you have to find out what works best for you and your securiy.
Because this generates many copies, you may want to delete older backups to free up disk space on your device. Maybe you hold all files for three or seven days and purge the older ones.
But here is another tip, after making such a backup copy and before you close your picture, load the backup as a second picture in Krita to check if that backup was saved correctly!
You may want to read the part about backups, crash recovery, the “Auto Save Function” that is only for crash recovery and does in fact not save automatically for you, but for Krita to restore that saved state in case of a crash, if you save a file successfully Krita will delete this “Auto Save File” because its purpose is fulfilled (you saved successfully (many users never read this and BELIEVED Krita would automatically save their work for them, and they cried bitterly in cases of hazard)), and other related things in Krita’s manual.
Here is the part about Saving, AutoSave and Backup Files in Krita’s manual.
After you’ve read through that part of the manual, you possibly want to set new values for the settings found via the menu
‘‘Settings’’ >> ‘‘Configure Krita’’ >> ‘‘General’’ in the tab ‘‘File Handling’’
For instance, I have enabled >>
Enable Autosaving
I have set my Autosave Interval to >>
“Autosave Interval: Every 7 min”
I have enabled >>
“Unnamed autosave files are hidden by default”
I have enabled >>
“Create @ Backup File on Saving”
and there I have set >>
“Backup File Location” to >> “Same Folder as Original File”
I have set the standard Krita setting >>
“Backup File Suffix: ~”
AND HERE I raised the preset value to 6 >>
“Number of Backup Files Kept: 6”
These are settings that work so far for me, if these work for you, you must find out by yourself.
Michelist
Add/Edit: Changed the Cloud space provider.
a silly question but by making a copy of the “corrupted” painting, i should literally just make a copy of the “corrupted” painting, right? And how do I make a copy of it on my tablet, when the error keeps popping up everytime I try to click on the painting?
I open my Files app, long press on the file I want to copy, select “copy to” from the 3-dot menu at the top of the screen and when the folder list comes up I select the same folder in which it currently resides. This gives me a copy of the file with a (1) appended to the file name.
Hey, sorry for not answering immediately, because of uni and other stuff as well. I copied my painting and got the link for it from [ufile.io]. I tried to send it to you on the krita forum, like you told me, but I cant seem to find the message button. Could I send you the link via email, or should I only send it to you on the krita forums?
It seems that I was able to rescue at least most of your picture.
I added three KRA-Files as well as your preview image and your reference file all together to a ZIP-Archive and send you the link via PM. The difference between both KRA-Files is that one has your reference file and the other not. In this case, IZ-Arc was able to recover most of your damaged Krita file, and it was the source for Elke Otsu w⧸o reference.kra and Elke Otsu with reference.kra. And ZipGenius 6 was able to repair and unzip your corrupted file too, but with a little difference when it comes to the optical result in Krita, so I made it the source for Elke Otsu with reference - alternative.kra which created from that recovery.
Please see your PM from me for the link and more information on the process, and if you are happy with the result, you can mark this topic as solved.
Michelist
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