I am getting the “Unexpected File Format” error when I try to open my Sketchup 2021 file. I didn’t have this issue yesterday and didn’t see anything wrong when I was saving and using it. Can somebody help recover this file asap?
Where do you live?
United States
Were you working on a file saved out to the cloud?
Upload the file here. Colin might be able to fix it.
I had it saved to my desktop. When I try uploading it to this reply it gives me an error saying it won’t load
Probably the file size it too large. Upload it to DropBox and share the link.
I can’t recover the file, I asked developers to take a look.
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Is there something I did that made this happen, so I know what to NOT do in the future?
THANK YOU! It looks like it’s all there!!
There may have been one material that caused problems, also note that there is a bit of geometry way off the top of the scene.
@colin I can’t seem to find that geometry off in the distance. Any tips on how to see it so I can get rid of it? Also, my file seems to have been corrupted again. Is it possible to get it fixed again? Any suggestions on what I can do to stop this?
You can see the geometry I meant by doing a zoom extents.
The developer will look at your new file, but you may as well download the file I gave you last night, and make sure to keep a copy of it. What actions had you do after getting that file back?
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@Blackbudda117 I am seeing random bit flips in the data which I cannot explain. The first corruption was a single bit flip in the entire data. This second one has a similar bit flip but at least one other that’s making the recovery very difficult.
Are you saving to a local disk or is there some network drive / cloud storage involved?
I just started wondering, not knowing the intricacies of the business. What makes SketchUp files so vulnerable? Are other data formats more robust? What is the difference between using cloud storage and using network drives through the Internet via a VPN connection?
I have now worked remotely for almost two years, through the internet and VPN. Mostly with other applications than SketchUp, and I haven’t noticed instances of data loss, even as many of the files involved are very large, and I have used alternatively my ADSL connection or a mobile 4G network.
My only experience of data loss is when the company server broke down some time in the late 1990s. Ever since a LAN was set up, all our files have been saved on network drives, and saving work files locally is forbidden.
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I few weeks ago, I had asked a similar question in one of these frequent topics. Network storage services should be very reliable (otherwise the operator of the service would soon go out of business if there were general corruption problems).
@Anssi Nothing makes SketchUp files vulnerable to network drives or cloud storage. Applications do not even know which medium they are writing to; these are all handled by the OS. We’ve just seen some evidence in the past of corruptions during file transfers and I thought I’d ask as a data point. Not that this should make any difference.
We have fixed bugs in our code that caused data corruptions in rare cases. However, there are still these rare reports that we are working hard to understand. So far, we haven’t found a reproducible case, unfortunately.
What many of us in the forum have observed during the years is that perhaps most of the people who have brought up the “Unexpected file format” error have been saving directly to the cloud, to a cloud-synced folder or, in past years, on removable drives, and we have been warning against the practice.