I have no idea why or how it works but it has been the second time this particular version has saved my bacon.
I work in Mac and most of the time in a MacPro with ECC memory but at home on Intel/iMac and this has happened to me on both machines: once in a while for no particular reason I get a corrupted file. Usually heavy files with high layer count and many Smart Objects, one of the files was a 7GB PSB and the other more recently (today) was a 14.4GB file. The simtoms were the same it crashes PS while trying to open and browsing with Bridge crashes the moment you open the folder where those files are located.
I can't remember exactly where I read but I once saw a forum recommendation to use PS 2018 (v19) to fix SmartObject corruption, as a last resource decided to try.
Those files would crash any version in any computer, tried windows and mac, PS 2020,21,22,23 Beta, etc...
Since in Mac PS 2018 is a no go in recent Macs (its tied to an ancient MacOSX version) I used VirtualBox with a free distribution windows test version (used to test browsers , distributed my Microsoft directly and AFAIK free) and downloaded PS 2018 from Pro Design Tools and although I have a PS account was no sure if it would work in such an older version (pre-subscription model) so out of precaution I disabled VM network after install before opening PS to use it as trial.
And...voilá.It opened my corrupted file, did a Save As to another location and magically the file was ready to go again.
Just sharing in case anyone in the future stumbles with this post looking for a solution for a similar scenario.
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