File error recovery from using portable usb drive
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Hi folks!
I am hoping one of you lot may be able to assist...
Stupidly worked on an old laptop, saving files to an external usb for portability while the kids where doing schoolwork... suddenly two of my latest files are un-openable, converted miracuriously to .skb files. Typicaly, to my horror i realised i had not copied these to my pc for a couple of days...I was working in sketchupv8 at the time on a win7 laptop. Noticed there was an issue as soon as i tired to access the file again from sketchup2016/2020 on a w10 machine.
What i have done:
It affected two files, i manage to open one in v8 by changing file extension to .skp on the laptop, i copied this and savedas a duplicate.. then the two original .skb files that had been visible on the drive disapeared all together. I only have this single copy now. Luckily, they both where similar file regards content.As it opened again on the laptop post problem.. i thought great i had solved it, but when i tried on the PC on sketchup 2016 and 2020 and both failed again to open. .. went back to laptop and no joy at all now! unable to open it in v8 either.. argh!
The error i get is 'unexpected file format' however i have also seen an error about exceeding file length occasionally.
I am running a file recovery on the portable disk, but in the meantime if anyone has a magic fix i would really appreciate it! As i managed to open it once.. i thought i could do it again, but multiple tricks down the line and nothing
I have seen some post comments about MacOS might be worth a shot?
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The file you shared is corrupted. Very likely there was a delay in writing to the USB drive. We've seen similar file format problems in the past when files are not locally (internally) saved. It seems to most often happen when saving to the cloud but I've seen it once in awhile when saving to a USB device.
The .skb files are backup files that are normally created by SketchUp during autosave. If you can find them you could try renaming them to .skp and see if they will open. If they didn't get corrupted, too, they should open.
It's rare that corrupted files can be recovered. Are you using SketchUp 2016 Make as indicated by your profile?
Might be the sort of thing where the fastest option is to just get busy creating a new model. This time save it to the local drive and only copy it to the USB drive if you need to make it portable.
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