5

I saved my QGIS project as a .qgz file and then my computer crashed (however I can't confirm that the saving had completed successfully). After restarting the computer, however, the .qgz archive no longer works and crashes QGIS when I try and load it.

The QGIS desktop window begins with the ~"Loading project:" project tracker with the green bar in the bottom panel but stops immediately and freezes the program to the "crash report" window.

If I try and open the archive with 7zip I get an error message "Can not open file '...' as archive".

Is there any way to access or repair information from a .qgz file/archive?

alternatively ... does QGIS save a backup of the archive or just the project file on the computer somewhere similar to the .qgs~ file in the old system?

I get the QGIS crash report shown below:

Stack Trace

zip_source_function_create :
zip_source_function_create :
QgsZipUtils::unzip :
QgsProjectArchive::unzip :
QgsProject::unzip :
QgsProject::read :
QgisApp::addProject :
QgisApp::openProject :
main :
BaseThreadInitThunk :
RtlUserThreadStart :

QGIS Info
QGIS Version: 3.2.2-Bonn
QGIS code revision: 26842169e9
Compiled against Qt: 5.9.2
Running against Qt: 5.9.2
Compiled against GDAL: 2.2.4
Running against GDAL: 2.2.4

System Info
CPU Type: x86_64
Kernel Type: winnt
Kernel Version: 6.1.7601
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9

You should try attacking it with a zip file recovery tool.

I just tried corrupting a QGZ by deleting a few bytes at the end. QGIS crashed (this should possibly be submitted as a bug report so that it can catch corrupt QGZ files). zip can't extract it.

But doing zip -FF project.qgz --out fix.zip produced a fix.zip which contained a project.qgs - that had some of the layer info but was still quite corrupted and QGIS wouldn't load it. Depending on what's in your project file you might have some success. I used zip on the Linux command line, you might find zip repair tools for your operating system elsewhere.

I don't see any backups of QGZ files being made by QGIS. Some time ago I wrote a plugin that saved a backup at regular intervals for a much earlier version of QGIS, there is this one: https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/autoSaver/ now which might save you in future.

Tip: rename project.qgz to project.zip so that tools can find it.

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2
  • Thanks mate. Will try some more along these lines. Unfortunately the first windows program I used, after renaming to zip, thought there was no files in there even though the file I have's listed as 165kb which, on reflection, is probably too small to be of value anyway. So I should probably just start recreating it now instead of wasting more time desperately hoping I don't have to. Only 2 days work plus 1 trying to fix it lost! Seems a pretty big problem that, even if I did crash the PC whilst saving (though pretty sure I didn't), QGIS didn't preserve the old one till the new one was created.
    – guestagain
    Aug 24 '18 at 9:15
  • I just installed autosaver. Great idea, but where does it place the backup .qgz?
    – Stu Smith
    Jan 8 '19 at 6:17

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