Peculiar and dangerous mishandling of open files in Photoshop 21

[Superneutrino]

Ok. This will be hard to explain. But it happened before, and it happened in older and newer versions. 

I had two different files opened. I was just working on one checking if everything is okay so I can save them. Then I realized, both files are suddenly the same. And they werent just a second before. I wasn't saving them. Wasn't duplicating them. Didn't mess with anything except one smart object that was open too which I closed.

Now I wasn't sure what to do but I didn't want to lose the work. Hoping it's just some screen drivere issue (which happened before) I closed and saved. And got two same files. One was replaced with other while it was being open and I have no clue how. There is no shortcut that could do that. There is no action that could do that.

There was nothing in recovery folder, no even smart objects in temp folder. And there should be tons of smart objects.

Windows 11 Pro, Photoshop 21 (the one with two flamingos)

Similar thing happened before but I wasn't saving files and would just close Photoshop when it start behaving weird like image not updating,  layers become weird and behaving glitchy.

[D Fosse]

Most likely you have saved one file under the other file's name. Very easy to do with one wrong click in the Save dialog, I've done it myself.

Now, there is an underlying problem in all this, which is that there is virtually no visual differentiation beween active and background files when you're working in floating windows. They all look exactly the same. I usually have to grab the file and move it around a bit to make sure I have the right file. It makes it extremely easy to save the wrong file under the wrong name. This is something they should definitely do something about.