Strange Substance Painter File Corruption

rollin

I had this happen from time to time but now I have a freaking test case
I have two files where one is (or was) just a copy of the other. Both show the same bit size and save date if I view the windows file properties. 

But one file does open and the other shows the "possibly data corruption" error with "cant open painter.bin file"
[Hdf5Archive] Archive 'file:///C:/doesNotWork.spp' appears to be corrupted. Cannot read 'paint/document.bin'

Now my naive me would say this is impossible because both files seem exactly the same (from what windows tells me) but reality is laughing at me as one file is obviously working and the other not. 

This is with version 2018.3.3
I had this (or a similar issue) now for several times with various versions of painter but this time it's really funny bc I have those two files

Is this known?

Sadly Winmerge has a bug which prevents me to compare the two files. I'm going to find another tool for that


Edit1: Windows fc command does show some bits differ (now... obviously I'm wondering how this could happen if both files show the same last edit timestamp)

Jerc

Not sure why one version is corrupted and the other isn't, but I would advise upgrading if you can since those corruption issues have since been fixed in more recent versions.

rollin

Jerc said:

Not sure why one version is corrupted and the other isn't, but I would advise upgrading if you can since those corruption issues have since been fixed in more recent versions.

Do you know the version when this or these bugs was / where fixed?

poopipe

The only recurrent/reliable corruption bug I've seen on 2018.3.3 to date has been to do with running out of disk space.

It's actually been very stable compared to the previous few versions which is why we're still running it at the office. 

rollin

Hm .. disk space is most likely not the cause.. I find the setup of this case very dubious.. Sounds like the file was altered when I tried to open it but without showing in the windows file properties. In fact this is the first time in my whole windows life that I have such a case. Not the first time that substance painter killed some files though.
Which is why I usually have to re-open a saved file with a 2nd painter instance just to check that everything went right.. But now with this case of the copy-is-working I'm questioning my sanity.. 

poopipe

Saving everything as monolithic binary files is IMO a crap idea - once they break you're fucked and they'll never iron out every single possible bug 

I appreciate that Allegorithmic want the files to be dependency free and portable but it leads to painter being a nightmare to deal with as part of a larger pipeline and makes people extremely shy of taking updates. 
At least with ascii files we stand a chance of making a repair instead of being forced to take the hit of hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost work. 

I realise that's a bit off topic but whatever, it's better to get it out there 

Jerc

We are aware of the issues related to file size and are exploring options, but as you imagine, it's not an easy change and has tons of repercussions.