Hi Colin,
I need help! This happened to me for the first time and it corrupted the last three saves ( I save often to avoid issues like this! Many hours of work)…
It says unexpected file format… I use VRAY so I’m assuming some material or import corrupted the file. Thank you for your help!
Thank you so much Colin for your kind assistance. Really appreciate it. Have a nice day!
One of the groups in your model had problems. Try this file:
There are a number of demanding things in your model. That isn’t the reason a group got corrupted, but you could make the model perform better.
Thank you!! I know I could clean it up but I work on client approval timelines so things always get rushed trying to get renders out at midnight and what not 
.
You are a lifesaver!!! I am so so grateful for your assistance. The model opens up perfect!
FWIW, you’d save time overall if you cleaned up your models as you go. I did a quick bit of clean up in your model.
This reduced the file size by about 40% and made it perform much better on my computer.
Thanks! I’ll make an effort to purge more often. I get laser vision on what I’m trying to build. I appreciate the tip!
Hi there - can anyone help me recover this file? Same issue. Unexpected file error and bug splat. I’ve tried opening the .skb file and get the same result. I’m sure I need to purge and clean things up (I’m not the only person working in it unfortunately)…
@colin or @DaveR - would either of you be able to help? It sounds like you were life savers for a few others here!
I was able to open the model, other than one group that had problems.
Incredible - thank you SO much!!!
Have you or other team members been able to determine patterns in such problematic groups or components, and possibly ideas on how the problems arise? Hopefully the goal is to make SketchUp self-detect such problems and give the user options for how to proceed when opening the file, or (if the problems might be caused by some circumstances within SketchUp during the Save process) prevent such problems from being written to files in the first place.
One customer was able to provide a Ruby script that could introduce an error. We’re trying to understand which part of the script is important.
We are trying to do something to make SketchUp cope better when these errors occur. When we get somewhere with that I will come back and let you know.
You have to make it so we can access your file. As it is, we’d have to sign in with your credentials to do so.
Are you really using SketchUp Free which is web based, as your forum profile indicates?
Quoting myself there…
Most of the recent successful recovery that I’ve done in the forum over the last month or so have been because I was able to use a version of SketchUp that was going to become 2023.1. In that we have made SketchUp cope better with corruptions when they happen. Instead of not noticing the problem, doing a save, and not being able to open the file again, you now should see a dialog telling you what had been fixed.
We still don’t know what leads to the corruption. If you see the new dialog and can remember what you recently changed, try doing the change again and see if the dialog reappears. If it does, please let me try your model and the steps you had done.
Can u help me for fixing this file it is important project i work on it for few months and i don’t know how it not opening after moving it to new pc my version 23.1.315
file000000.skp
plz help i will be appreciated if you could fix it.
@colin @DaveR
Large chunks of the file are filled with zeros, and other parts of the file seem to be random data.
Do you have an SKB backup of the model?
i don’t have it
Why don’t you have the .skb file? Where did it go?
when i create the skp file project there’s no skb there i don’t know and even now when i work on project on it no skb file created in my old 2021 version is created but in my new version 2023 no file created
and this file is one from others have same problem and even when get back to my old pc not work there also
There is no SKB at first. When you do your first Save there still is no SKB. When you do your second save, your first save is renamed to be SKB. An SKB is the same model, but one older in terms of saves you have done.
If you have done at least two saves, there should be an SKB, unless you turned off the save a backup option in preferences.