Hey all, I am fairly new to Krita (ver 4.4.8) and have been having issues with losing progress. I’m not sure if this is related to layers, since most of the stuff that disappeared had its own layer or if I’m just straight losing my work.
It first happened when I was in the middle of a sketch, I was messing around with a transparency mask on a different layer and when it didn’t do what I expected I was crl+z ing out of any changes. I noticed after messing around that all the progress I made with the previous section I was working on had vanished. I couldn’t have undid all of it on accident, there were too many brushstrokes and I’m positive it would have hit the undo limit. I didn’t save my work so was kinda stuck with it and just moved on.
After this issue I made some serious progress and was constantly saving throughout so I wouldn’t lose any anything if it happened again. I opened the file today and all the new layers are gone. BUT WTF the original progress I lost is in here.
What the hell is going on here? I tried googling the issue and the closest I found was a post here where the antivirus may have been preventing them from saving at all. To clarify I have been able to save before without issue, and I didn’t feel like this solved the issue of my progress/layers disappearing mid sketch. I did however comb through my antivirus software to make sure it hadn’t blocked it recently on accident.
I tried to find autosave versions, one I found looks the same and the other won’t open at all (although the thumbnail looks the same). I have searched my entire PC for files, and nothing is saved in the cloud/OneDrive. Looking through the usage log, there seems to be a steady file size increase to correlate with me drawing/saving yesterday up until the last save where it drops (33 MB → 14 MB) and overwrites my original save.
I’m sure my recent progress is gone for good, but I need to know how to prevent this in the future if I’m going to use Krita. Any advice appreciated, thanks.
I’m sure we can find what is happening, but at first glance my guess is that you maybe open your image twice inside of Krita?
If you open your .kra file in the OS folder (by double clicking usually) and open the same way again, Krita will open the same file twice. This is a sure way to disaster.
Because you will work on one of the Krita’s instance of the file, but the other instance will remain untouched. Until you try closing it and the program ask you if you want to save.
Krita will save the file you worked on, and then save the ‘untouched’ file over it. Making you lose progress.
If not, and you’re sure the image was open only once we will have to investigate further. Not to mention the random layers being deleted.
One thing you can try is looking for a file with a ~ at the end of the file name. In your case it will be Roleke.kra~. This file is an auto-backup of your save. Everytime Krita saves a file it makes a copy of the previous save.
By your logs the Roleke.kra should be 14mb, as it was saved last. The previous save should be the Roleke.kra~, that should be 33mb and have the latest of your work before closing Krita.
In order to keep such data loss as low as possible in the future, you could create additional backups during painting at short intervals with “save incremental version”, the key combination is STRGALTS, which you can delete after the end of a session if you are sure that you no longer need the files, or as I do only at the end of a project, so I always have enough backup points to be able to quickly access any editing status.
I opened the Roleke.kra~ and it was all there! At least the most recent updates, I can copy the original stuff I lost over and I will have it all.
When I had the original issue, I may have mixed and matched my ctrl + z and undo button (which happens to be next to the save). Maybe I miss clicked, and then hit undo and the autosave caught a different version?
