Repeated corruption of files and loss of work in Photoline 18.53

[SarahNewton]

EDIT: I THINK THIS HAS BEEN RESOLVED - SEE MY POST BELOW

Hi there,

I've been using Photoline for a couple of years, mostly on a Mac but for the past 6 months on a PC. Recently I've started using it for mapmaking, using more of Photoline's functions - multiple layers, layer effects, layer styles, larger images, etc.

Over the past week I've had a couple of instances of saved files suddenly getting corrupted while working. It's just happened today and I've lost upwards of 16 hours' work. The files were saved and even backed up, but Photoline is now refusing to open them with the message "Error: Problem while loading" and, if I persist, it throws a severe error and crashes.

The files contain multiple layers (say, 30 text layers over 5 image layers), layer effects and styles, with a resolution of 3000px x 3000px (basically for print) - so nothing I would consider that problematic.

Can anyone help? Is my work completely lost? Is there a debug? Should I be using a different program for this kind of work?

Thanks in advance,

Sarah

[bkh]

Strange. I've been using PL on a Mac for more than six years now, and never had a corrupt PLD file. Might be a hard disk problem. Have you checked your hard disks with Disk Utility? Have you experienced any strange delays while saving the files which might be an indication of a hard drive starting to fail?

In order to recover some of your work, you might try "File Juicer" (there's a free demo version at http://echoone.com/filejuicer/download) which can extract image layers from a PLD file, but it's hard to know in advance how big the damage is).

Cheers

Burkhard.

[SarahNewton]

Thanks Burkhard,

This is Photoline 18.53 running on a practically new PC, new install, and everything else is running fine. It's just a repeated problem with Photoline - I have no issues with any other programs. I've tried to open the same file using Photoline on a Mac, and it also refuses.

Thanks for the File Juicer link! I'll take a look, but failing that or a response from Photoline I'll start trying to rebuild the file.

Do you know if there's any issue opening files created with PL18 if I upgrade to PL19? I have a lot of work created in PL18, but I'm trying to work out how to avoid this happening again.

Cheers,

Sarah

[photoken]

Can anyone help?

I suggest e-mailing the corrupted file to PL support. Perhaps after analyzing it they can make a determination of where in the editing process the corruption occurs.

[bkh]

This is Photoline 18.53 running on a practically new PC, new install, and everything else is running fine. It's just a repeated problem with Photoline - I have no issues with any other programs. I've tried to open the same file using Photoline on a Mac, and it also refuses.

Sorry, I seem to have misread your e-mail – seems that you have switched to Windows, so please ignore my advice (you can still try File Juicer on the Mac, and I'm sure there is something similar for Windows).

Do you know if there's any issue opening files created with PL18 if I upgrade to PL19? I have a lot of work created in PL18, but I'm trying to work out how to avoid this happening again.

Font line spacing seems to be a bit different for some fonts, afaik, but in any case, PLD files are supposed to be compatible between versions 18 and 19.

Even if it's a new PC, I'd check for file system corruption and the like – and a new hard disk is more likely to fail than one that worked for a year or two. Running a RAM test can't hurt, either. Graphics programs like PL tend to use lots of RAM and hard disk space and are therefore more likely to hit upon one of these hardware errors than other programs.

Anyway, sending your file to PL support can't hurt.

Cheers

Burkhard.

[iosoio]

Even if it's a new PC, I'd check for file system corruption and the like – and a new hard disk is more likely to fail than one that worked for a year or two. Running a RAM test can't hurt, either. Graphics programs like PL tend to use lots of RAM and hard disk space and are therefore more likely to hit upon one of these hardware errors than other programs.

Anyway, sending your file to PL support can't hurt.

Cheers

Burkhard.

When a file gets corrupted it's often because of a RAM problem. I would say a corrupted DIMM rather than a disk failure.
Bye.

[SarahNewton]

Hi everyone,

Thanks to Gerhard's perseverance it looks like we've just traced what the problem was. Basically, I was running the 32-bit version of Photoline rather than the 64-bit version. I had both installed on my machine, but (probably since the "rebuild" following upgrading from Win8.1 to Win10) I'd been using the 32-bit app instead of the 64-bit. I didn't even notice until I started doing heavy-duty stuff like the relatively complex background layers with diff clouds and masks, etc, which boosted the file size up to 70MB and caused PL32 to fall over, perhaps corrupting the file at save time.

I'm now running PL64 and so far it's all looking good. I've been able to recreate my corrupted file and am keeping a close eye on what gives, but I'm hoping the issue is resolved.

Cheers,

Sarah

[photoken]

I'm now running PL64 and so far it's all looking good.

That makes sense. Although Windows x64 versions do an excellent job of "lying" to 32-bit apps so those apps think they've always got lots of RAM to work with, there's bound to be a limit to that technique. Using the 64-bit version of PL will ensure that all the available RAM will be directly used by PL.

Glad to hear you've got it sorted out.