Yesterday morning I had been trying to open up one of our LayOut files and it popped up with the error message “Error reading LayOut file”. I had just been working on it the previous day and everything was fine. I moved on to another LayOut file yesterday afternoon which was also working well, everything saved, updated, and synced with the Sketchup file. This morning, I tried to open that one, and the same error message appeared. The backup files also have been showing this error message.
We’ve now lost two LayOut files and I’m needing help with recovering them or figuring out why this is happening to prevent the same issue with our other files.
I’ve checked the sketchup files, they are all a good size, not very large. There are no weird files within them, pretty much just geometry and some 2D symbols. The layout files are also not too large, so I don’t think that is the issue. I did make a LayOut template that I’ve used for each of these files, could that possibly be part of the problem? I have uploaded one of the files to this post in case that helps!
I’m just at a complete loss! If anyone has any advice, please help! I’ve been working on files for all of our models for the past several weeks and my work is just disappearing.
My company uses one drive so we can all access and work on the same files. We did find out though that they will open in Layout 2025, but whenever we try to open the files in 2026 the error message appears.
All of our other Layout files have been working perfectly fine. We seem to only be having an issue with this set, which I made a new template for. I’m thinking there may be something wrong with the template I made. Could that be possible?
Sure, but the denominator we see on the forum for corrupted files is saving to a cloud drive. You can keep on with it, but the best practice is not to do so.
Regarding templates - which version was it made in?
It’s not my company so I don’t have control over where things are saved. I’ll be sharing this with my boss but in the meantime if you have any other helpful advice I’d love to hear it. Any idea how to recover the files maybe?
Any idea if the files can be recovered? Since the error message just said error reading instead of something else, I was hoping they could be recovered.
Everything was done in Layout 2026! My boss just popped it into 2025 version to see if it would open and it did. I was just thinking it could be the template because our other layout files have not had this issue, but it is reoccurring with these files that are all on the same template. I put the file in the original post, does it not show up? I can try sharing it again. Thanks!
I apologize; I was able to see your comment before it went away. Thank you for trying to look into it! I’d love to hear your advice on what can be fixed in the SketchUp file itself, I’m definitely not an expert with the program. Does the layout file have to be in the same folder as the Sketchup file? I’d never heard of that, but I can try rearranging the files to have them together if that might solve some of the issues?
There seems to be a lot of unneeded duplication of work in your SketchUp model. You shouldn’t need all those 2D drawings of elevations and plan views. With correct tag usage you should be able to create all of the different options you need to show in a single copy of the building.
Make sure you are using tags correctly. I fixed the incorrect tag usage and got this.
There are a few excessively large textures for what they do in your model. Learning to keep them in check will help.
This model is pretty basic as these things go but getting to grips with lean, efficient modeling will pay off more as the models get more complicated.
It doesn’t have to be but I’ve found the best practice is to keep all of the references and the LayOut file for a project in a common folder. It makes it easier for LayOut to check for updates to the references when you open the LayOut file. If you must save copies of the project file to One Drive, copy the entire project folder from your computer to One Drive after you’ve successfully saved any of the files you’re working on. If you need to work on the project later, copy it back from One Drive to your computer so that all of the references are local and LayOut doesn’t need to be trying to access the cloud when checking files or making saves. Think of the whole thing as if the project was in a folder in a file cabinet in the file room. You want to work on the project so you take the entire folder to your desk so you only have to make one trip to get everything. When you’re finished for the day you have everything in the one folder and you go back and put in in the file cabinet where it belongs.
I was able to open the LO file in 25, I did a save as but could not get it to open in 26. I tried saving it back to LayOut 22 and open it in 26, but it still does not open.
Paging @Colin - maybe he can get someone from the LayOut team to look at the file and why it opens in older versions but not in 26.
I did submit a ticket on the SketchUp website for some help but haven’t heard back yet so I thought I’d come here too! We paid for the templates and have a subscription to some Layout/Sketchup stuff from them. As for the template itself I had made up the file and saved it as a template, so it should be in the folder with all the other files, but I didn’t save a specific file for the template. I think the template file should be the original Layout file, if that makes sense?
You’d have to see what is setup in SketchUp preferences for the templates folder. It should be local, but windows and OneDrive do some weird stuff (i see it on my kid’s laptops, I’m on a Mac).
If you have the template file - start a new drawing from that template and copy paste from the current file into the new file. Save it locally a see if it behaves properly. If it also doesn’t behave properly than something is going wrong with the file itself and not related to OneDrive.
In the next update from us we have a problem fixed, where certain files would open in 2025 but not 2026. The fix also lets you save the file, and even current versions of 2026 can then open the file.
