I'm not crying. "This does not appear to be a SketchUp Model"

Hello, hopefully someone in this forum can give me a hand. I was working over the weekend on some files from my main computer at work to my laptop at home and at some point of saving my files got corrupted. Few layout files and the SketchUp associated with them. So I am, fried.

I’ve read every blog post with information about this issue but I haven’t had luck rescuing any of them.

Yes, I was working directly on the drive and there are not any files on the temp folder I can salvage.

Could anybody give me a hand? advise?

@colin can sometimes recover portions of a damaged file. He should notice that I pinged him and as time allows give it a shot.

Thanks for the prompt response @slbaumgartner

Fingers crossed @colin can take a look.

Alas, I took a quick look with a hex editor and the file you shared does not contain SketchUp’s (plain text) signature at its beginning, it all looks like binary data. Colin may be able to perform a miracle (he is a SketchUp team member and has access to proprietary resources), but I wouldn’t hold out much hope.

Puft. Not even sure how this could’ve happened when I was careful to wait for the drive to do its thing and eject it properly. Thanks for taking a look. have you ever had this problem with layout? I’m experiencing the same.

I took a look on it too with hex mode, and seems to be a kind of encrypted file.
Don’t you have a special encryption software on that drive?

So you weren’t working on the file on an internal drive?

Not really. No.

No. External. Could you take a look at this file?
05.26_truss.skp (14.0 MB)

The recommendation is to always save the file to your local internal drive and work on it from there. Then save a copy externally. That should be evident in all those threads on this topic here.

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:frowning: That one looks “less corrupted” (I can trace the internal file structure names) however I can’t recover anything of it. :confounded:

Maybe colin will have better tools to recover… :pray:t4:

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I found the same as @dezmo. Good luck! Note: Today is a US holiday. I don’t know whether Colin has the day off. You might not get a reply from him until tomorrow or later.

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Wow yeah. No luck on this end either. Thanks for checking. Remodelling is what it’ll be.

I do have today off, but what I do in the forum isn’t really part of my job, so I don’t mind trying to help even if it’s after hours or on a holiday.

Unfortunately, the first file seems to be completely scrambled, don’t know how it got into that state. The second file looks correct, but fails to open. The tools I have for dealing with that only work on 2020 or earlier version files, and this is a 2021 file.

I have created a bug report, and included the file. Hopefully the developers will be able to see why it is the file is failing to open. Pretty sure they won’t look at it before tomorrow, and I know there is other work queued up, that might delay when the file will be looked at.

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After seeing @colin 's reply, I remembered that a SketchUp 2021 .skp is really a renamed zip archive (same concept as .rbz is a zipped archive of Ruby files). My zip utility complained about extra bytes either at the start or somewhere within the archive. Those extras appear to have offset everything from the locations where they were supposed to be in the file, causing the zip utility to fail to find the expected start of any of them. Later today I’ll take a stab at seeing whether I can remove those extras (depends on whether it is obvious where they are!), and see if by doing so I can heal the file.

Thank you so much for getting on this @colin appreciate the bug report. Let me know what you hear. At this point I’m rebuilding cause install is tomorrow but, yeah thanks!

I have seen this error message when saving files with beta versions of sketchup 2021 and then trying to open them with the current official 2021.

If this is the issue, check if you can still open the files on the original computer and then save them to the 2020 format.

Its heartbreaking to hear of corrupt files.

In 2021 it’s pretty common for people to work online/cloud storage, external/swappable drives, servers etc… even coming from Sketchup Web (where cloud-saves are the norm)…

Is there a clear enough prompt for users when saving (say, the first few times) that SKP and LO files should both be located on a local hard drive, or risk corruption?

Yeah nope. Files were all created in 2021 official software. Thank you