Lemma Soft Forums

So today marks my second time losing a WIP art file to Paint Tool SAI.

I think the entire file gets corrupted- when I back up my art folder to another drive, broken files included, it stops on those files and can't read them.

IS there anything I can do to prevent this from taking place besides obsessive backups (which I already do)

Uh-oh, not again D:

You could try saving as .psd? At least then you could use recovery software to recover most – if not all – of the layer data. True, you could lose the editing option for some of the sai-specific features, like Paints Effect (don't ask me, that's how the dev named it), but if you don't use them anyway, then it shouldn't matter.

Or another way is that (and this is what I do) you could have 2 files for each picture, and just alternate between them every hour or every few hours while saving. It's slightly paranoiac, but it's a lot better than, say... losing an entire sprite file, yeah? :S

I've never had that problem before (considering that I never use SAI), but maybe you could save at checkpoints as well as the typical save after each edit type of thing. My wording is a bit awkward since I don't know what to call it, but save a new file every time you get a decent sized segment done. (Like, sketch, lines, base color, shading--a new file building up from each one of the previous, so when you get to the last one, you'll have all the work you did, but if you mess up, you can always go back to the previous step.)

It's more of a thing that I do so I can cut down on file sizes though (merging some layers and whatnot when I move onto the next steps, but keeping them in the previous file just in case I need em) (big files are laggy)

I actually have started to back up files, both physically (to another drive) and as PSD as you suggested (Thanks for the suggestion nevertheless ). Still, I wish I knew what happened to my files. -_- fortunately this time I had clean lineart saved as a JPG for posting as a WIP.

These problems seem to be Windows specific, for me at least. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to run SAI under Wine with tablet support. I've been trying to transition to Ubuntu full time- not having SAI and screen recording are the only two things that keep me on windows.

And of course, thanks for the suggestions

Seconding...thirding? Making backups, and also the PSD thing. Are you saying that your SAI files are corrupting consistently? I've had SAI files corrupt before but it's only happened like...twice...ever. It's exceedingly unusual.

Incidentally, what version of SAI are you using?

Nekobako wrote:Seconding...thirding? Making backups, and also the PSD thing. Are you saying that your SAI files are corrupting consistently? I've had SAI files corrupt before but it's only happened like...twice...ever. It's exceedingly unusual.

Incidentally, what version of SAI are you using?

1.2. Version 2 hasn't been finished to a point where I feel it can replace 1.2 last I used it.

It's only happened twice for me as well, but it's still aggravating enough that I take notice. I try to avoid losing art if I can

I've been obsessively backing up my sai files and exporting to PSD every hour or so.

Sometimes my SAI files are corrupted, and I found out that one of the reason was because I opened PSD files format while working on SAI. So I tend to avoid that and so far it works, only one or two unlucky files got corrupted last year!

Explanations for corrupted SAI files
I read the journal up there and it helps a lot. Hope you didn't get any corrupted file again.

Sometimes this happend to me too and in my case, it was because i forgot the sai extension/deleted it when i tipped the file name.
Perhaps try adding .sai to the files and see if it works?

Do you use a lot of layers? I only had this problem a couple of times (and fortunately I always save in psd anyway, so it wasn't a problem). What I noticed was the problem for me, even though Sai didn't spell it out so clearly in the error message, was that I'd reached the layer count limit or that my file was so big Sai couldn't open it any more. Apparently there's a memory limit as well.

Another good habit to get into is to use some sort of repository to save your files onto: Dropbox is what I use and it lets me open previous versions of my files back to one month prior. I found this quite useful when I accidentally flattened my layers or deleted layers I didn't mean to delete. It's free to use up to a certain size and you can upgrade to something bigger later if you need to. I found it was enough for the projects I've saved on it (several CGs and sprites' worth of data), so you might find you never need to upgrade provided you move the files of older project out of Dropbox once you're done with them.

Yes, I use a lot of layers. Hopefully this will all get fixed when Version 2 gets a little more completed. But I've already moved on to Clip Studio paint, not to mention this was months ago ^^;

Hello

Registered just to post here so doubt I will be back.

Basically that you should go get the latest version of SAI from www.systemax.jp/en/sai/ which should be version 1.2.5 (as mentioned in the mail I got from SAI customer support below). This version is less strict on what it considers a corrupt file. WARNING! If the file is completely corrupt, there is no real way to save it... hence why saving regularly to dropbox is superior solution for every version. (better to loose a little progress then everything)

(below, response to my mail to customer support)
"Hello,

Sorry, I have not prepared an inspect tool and a repair tool for .sai file.

Would you please try to open the corrupted file by SAI Ver.1.2.5?
I modified the error detection for .sai file as lax from Ver.1.2.5.
If the corrupted file was not able to open by Ver.1.2.5, there is no way to open it.
www.systemax.jp/en/sai/

On the future, I may prepare some kind of recovery tool for .sai2 file on SAI Ver.2.

Thank you.

-Koji Komatsu"


P.S. I also posted the solution I mentioned here on the deviant art page that YuukiCrossPudding linked. http://xrozen-basesx.deviantart.com/art ... -353818268 is also a good place to look for a collection of solutions.