First, let me say that SketchCloud performs very very well and I have only ran into one glitch over several years of cloud use. But I was asked by our team leader to collect any issues from other team members to see if we had run into similar issues described below.. related to lost work. (I was case 1, and didn’t really lose work.. I just had to save as a new file).
I would say these are real anomalies.. 2 incidents over several years among 10 team members. But the request was to see if there was any kind of thing we could have done to avoid this in the future.. or corrective actions after the fact.
Case 1 Not sure which version - always use the latest available but this would have been about 1.5 years ago.
“I had a corrupt file issue that happened once (it refused to open in SketchCloud - just a blank sketch page with rainbow of doom spinner). I was posting a new set of updates to the cloud by clicking ‘Collaborate>View in browser’. The spinner popped up and just spun endlessly.. I retried several times and even let it spin for hours with no luck. I resaved the original file in Sketch as a new ‘backup’ file and tried posting that and it worked. My best guess was that some kind of system or network issue occurred just as I was saving the original file.. maybe a silent system update or something to cause the file to be corrupted while in the process of saving it. Whatever it was, the original file refused to post to the cloud.. but resaving it as a new local file then posting it to sketchcloud fixed the problem.”
Case 2. Again the version would have been recent probably happened 3-4 months ago.
“In another case, while updating mockups during a call, the sketch application hung. He noticed a loading icon (spinner) but after waiting for some time, there was no change. As a result, he had to switch off his system at the end of day. Later, he found that the files, including the workhe had done, were lost. He tried the steps on Help for retrieving the mockups. Although some previous mockups were recovered, other mockups created during the same session were missing.”
Thank you for posting this and indeed, these are definitely some things we’d love to review and improve on!
Case #1
This does seem like the document got stuck processing and, potentially, it had an error on the web app that we could have verified and provided steps to solve. When these errors happen we try to:
Collect logs to understand where the root cause is
Check our systems for any rendering or processing errors
Provide our customers with steps and procedures to solve the issue and continue their work without hiccups.
If this does happen again (we’ve made lots of improvements in this area, but still) do let us know via email, and we’ll happily jump in and check what might be happening.
Case #2
This could have been a similar case to the above. Sometimes we get these reports from customers where the local copy of the document just won’t save any new versions (this rarely happens), so we do have a way to prevent work from being lost (by making a backup of that local copy) and then downloading the last saved version on the Workspace and copying the missing bits over.
Both these cases happen very rarely these days since our team has worked in several areas to improve this process and make sure that the app always saves your work and sends all the new changes to the web app constantly.
Thanks for the prompt reply. I just ran into the phenomenon that one of my team members described.. and I think I know what might have caused it. Not sure if they triggered it in the same way, but the effect sounds identical. Here is my UAP report: (Unidentified Artboard Phenomena)
I grabbed an icon from a Powerpoint slide and clicked ‘Convert to shape’ - this turned it into a vector object.
I copied and pasted it into Sketch and ALL 20+ artboards ‘blanked out’ The content was there but not visible.
I pasted the icon into a new sketch file and exported it as an SVG. re-opened it in Sketch and the same result
I opened the SVG in Illustrator and saved it as an SVG. But first:
I had to remove 2 invisible objects that were attached to the shapes. I’m guessing these are ‘masking’ objects that MS includes just to mess everything up!
after removing these useless objects the SVG opened without a hitch in Sketch. All the artboards and contents remained visible.
So I’m not sure if this occured in the other reported caase - but based on the effects described - I’m guessing there may have been an invisible masking object at the top of the foodchain - that masked out all of the content on all the artboards.