My latest digital painting file got corrupted halfway through a commission

I was working on a character portrait for a client who paid me $150 upfront, and after 4 hours of layers and shading, Procreate just froze and the file turned into a gray square. I tried opening backups and even used a recovery tool, but the whole thing is gone and I had to start over from scratch. Has anyone found a reliable way to prevent file corruption on iPads or do you just save like 10 copies as you go?

3 comments

3 Comments

cora_scott778d ago

Tbh I saw a thread on Twitter from a digital artist who swears by using the "save as" feature instead of just hitting save every time. They said it creates a fresh file each time instead of overwriting the same one, so if it corrupts you still have the previous version. Also I read that dropping your brush size down and turning off certain Procreate gestures can help stop the app from crashing in the first place. That recovery tool you tried probably didn't work cause iPads don't handle file recovery the same way as computers do.

tara_jones947d ago

Oh man the date labeling is genius, I'm totally stealing that idea for my own messy file system lol.

the_cameron8d ago

Oh yeah, the "save as" thing is huge, I've been doing that for years on bigger projects and it's saved my butt more than once. I actually take it a step further (maybe overkill but whatever) where I'll duplicate the whole file and label it with the date like "sketch_v2_0314" so I have a literal timeline of backups if something goes sideways. The brush size thing is real too, I noticed Procreate gets real cranky with massive brushes on high-res canvases, so now I keep my big brushes for final details and use smaller ones for the rough blocking in. And honestly that recovery tool failing is such a bummer (I've been there with a lost piece I spent 8 hours on and it still stings), but cloud syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox after every session has been my safety net ever since.