MyPaint Ate My Artwork

OK, I went to save my work again, but the save menu was garbled, covered in other stuff. Some could be revealed by mousing over it. Instead of saving my work though, I only got .tmpsave.Evelyn Dorthy Martins.ora, which, being only 130 bytes, clearly wasn’t my artwork. I tried F7 to save a scrap, but that only made .tmpsave.scrap049_a, which also wasn’t my artwork. I restarted in the hopes an autosave would at least have most of it, but the only autosave for the picture was over a DAY old, so basically useless. What in hell happened? Is there ANY way to recover my picture? I’ve been using MyPaint for years, and this is the first time this has happened.

MyPaint 2.0.1

Windows 10 19043.1237
Wacom Intuos BT M

I am sorry to hear that happened to you! I also very recently lost a bunch of my artwork (my loss is not related to MyPaint however) and there is nothing quite like it to lose originals. I may have a couple of suggestions which may or may not help you locate your art.

Did you the file as you were working on it? If so, then you may want to try the following commands from your shell:

If you have locate:
$:> sudo updatedb

wait a short period of time for it to finish, then type:
$:> sudo locate *what_you_named_it*

That should search your filesystem and hopefully locate your files

If you don’t have locate, you can always use find:

$:> find / -name *partial_name*.ora -printf '%h/%f\n'

Finally, mypaint stores its files in ~/.local/share/mypaint and it saves backups of backups, especially if it crashes, so that is a good place to look as well.

If all of that fails, you can probably recover the files using an undelete program that supports the filesystem type you are using (probably ext4/btrfs). With a brief search I see a few that might get the job done…

ddrescue
*foremost
qphotorec
and
testdisk/photorec

Best of luck to you, I hope you get your files back. As for why that happened, your message doesn’t have enough information to make a determination.

~Tigr~~,