Saving PSB ends in no file or a corrupt file

[MZamani]

V24.0.1 & V24.1 both are highly unstable when it comes to saving PSB files which has costed me a hundrted hours of work so far:

1.  If you're in the middle of saving a PSB in the background, then cancel it and save again on the same file then the saved file is likely to becom corrupted (just white noise!) and all your efforts goes out of the window once you close the PS not knowing you saved a corrupt file. No error is shown during or after saving! 
2. If your PSB file is huge (>10gb) then you can not teust the save in background! As soon as you apply anything after saving, the final saved file turns to a 0bit file! The only way artound it is to pause all your work until the file is saved and then continue! No error is shown during or after saving! 

Although not many people might be using PS for huge images like me but PS is one of the very few apps out there that supported processing such images and the latest version is not stable for such a use!

[PECourtejoie]

Hi, sorry to hear that.

Are you saving locally? Are you saving to a folder monitored by dropbox or a similar cloud backup app?

[MZamani]

Hi,

Thyanks. Yes, saving localy on a SSD with no connection to dropbox or OneDrive or anything else. 

[kevin stohlmeyer]

Do you have enough free space available when saving to successfully complete the process?

How much scratch disk is available (Preferences/Scratch Disk) when you go to save your file?

[MZamani]

Yes, there's over a 1TB of free space for the scratch disk.

[CoryShubert]

Hi @MZamani sorry that you are seeing this issue. Do you remember when you first noticed this? Could you share your workflow for the team?

It may help if we could see your Photoshop System Info. Launch Photoshop, and select Help >System Info...and copy/paste the text in a reply.  

Thank you,

Cory

[J453]

I've tried to reproduce this for the past hour or so and can't get a corruption to occur.

It sounds like there may be something system specific (utility/driver/haxie) that may be in play here. If you run in safemode, do you get any corruption? https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/basic-troubleshooting.html#safemode

[D Fosse]

Do you have compression on? It's on by default.

With compression on for PSD/PSB, save time increases by a factor of five to ten (depending on file structure). Most of that time, perhaps 80% or so, is encoding, that is to say, CPU activity. Actual writing to disk only happens at the very end of that process.

So if you can reproduce this (I can't), it might be of interest to know roughly where in the save process it happens. And of course, if it also happens with compression disabled.

I have to say that I have used Photoshop professionally for fifteen years, saving anywhere between 10 and 50 PSDs and PSBs a day, many of them several GB. Each file is saved perhaps 10 -15 times in the process before final save. That's a lot of saves over the years. I have never, ever, seen any file corruption or lost files.

[antonioi21376345]

I've had this problem as well, but with PSDs. It occurs when/if I click the "x" cancel button down in the save progress bar. If I try to save again after having done this, the program will crash and the save file... its a crap shoot at that point. I've learned to never cancel a save...

[D Fosse]

After 8 or 10 tries I was finally able to reproduce, sort of.

Background save on, layered PSB at 5.3 GB, cancel "save as" to a new name during the save. That save produced a corrupt file - whereas, the expected result would be no file at all. The cancel was very near the end of the save.

Note - the corrupt file is not the original! That's unharmed. The unexpected behavior is that there appears a file at all, when it shouldn't because it was canceled.

The question now is - can this happen in a Save (not Save As), where you will overwrite the original? So far, I haven't been able to make that happen. I get the prompt to save changes, which obviously I click no to, and the file remains in its original state.  I'll try a few more times.

All in all, nothing so far I would call alarming. The saved corrupt file isn't supposed to be there at all.

[D Fosse]

More tries with "Save", all good, still no corruption.

I think this is the key:

As long as you click no here, you'll be fine. You don't get that in "Save As" (not applicable), only "Save".

Chris Cox once explained Photoshop's "safe save" procedure. I can't recall the details, but it involved saving a copy to temp, then replacing the original only at the very end after the saved copy was checked and found healthy.

[PECourtejoie]

Good reminder and detective work, Dag!

[MZamani]

@J453  thanks, didn't try the safe mode, have already uninstalled V24 and went back to the last stable version (V23.5.3) which seems to be working perfectly fine as usual. 

@CoryShubert Thanks, first encountered the second issue last week while saving a ~85gb PSB (multi layer image with dozens of adjustments) and a different ~120gp later in few days while using V24.1. Everytime that tried to save the same file and save as had to pause my work until the save was complete other wise the background saving processed in a couple of min (which is unusual for such a file) and then the final PSB output was a bit file! This was while there was no issue with saving PSB files smaller than 10GB!

So uninstalled V24.1 and went back to V24.01 which seemed to be fine for a while until  the first mentioned issue poped up after saving a different ~12GB PSB file 2 days ago and trying ot open it up yesterday and there was onlt a flat signle layer white noise instead of my multi layer image! 

Re System Info, sorry, have already uninstalled V24 and went back to V23.5.3 wwhich is working without an issue, not sure if it be to still helpful to you to have my V23.5.3 System info since it's not the version with the bug, but let me know if it could b estill be helpful to you. 

[MZamani]

@D Fosse , thanks for the reproducing effort and glad you haven't had issues with saving before! 

Never use a compression for my PSB/PSD files.

The first issue happened while saving on the same file and the second issue happened for both "save" and "save as".

Personally haven't had any issues with saving PSB files smaller than 10gb with V.24. My usual workflow is typicially using 10-200gb PSB files where the bug seem to shine.

Went back to V23.5.3 and it alls seems to be woking perfectly agian. 

[PECourtejoie]

Hello, @MZamani you can still share the System Info of 23.5, it will still give the host system configuration that did not change.

[D Fosse]

I think you should also check your whole hardware chain by swapping components one by one. "Single layer with noise" sounds like classic file corruption, which always turns out to be failing hardware.

The reason this sounded different was that it only happened in one particular situation - when a save was canceled halfway through. If that premise goes away, and it happens generally, we're looking at hardware.

A 100GB file is a lot of data to push through any system in one go. It will expose problems. The bigger the file is, the bigger the likelihood of a random "corruption event" hitting any one single file.