Crash

[Catriona]

I am literally on my last clip of the film. I had hoped to finish today. My Mac ran out of space and TVPaint crashed. I've cleared some space, but now it crashes on startup every time. Trying not to panic.

[Catriona]

Running MacOS 10.13.6 on an iMac Retina 5K, 2017
Processor 4,2 GHz Intel Core i7

I have restarted. Reinstalled the software. Removed the config file. Running out of ideas.

[Peter Wassink]

i'm not a mac user so i'm not sure if i can help, maybe you could try install an older tvpaint version?

[slowtiger]

Out of space: you mean hard disk space? (Last time I had this problem was in the 90's ...)
Do you have more than one volume? An external drive?
If only 1 volume: see that you can have 20% free space.

[Catriona]

Yes, hard disk space. I've just got one volume, 2TB, all full. Have got external hard drives (also 2TB), am going to have to shift everything over to them even though I'd hoped to do that afterwards and not during the project. Am crunching away at that as we speak.

However, I'm worried that it seems to have broken TVPaint. Every time I try to start it up, it loads the file, gets to 100% and "quits unexpectedly". This although I've freed up 235GB in the meantime. I really hope this won't have corrupted my files in some way.

[slowtiger]

Uh oh. This sounds like a corrupted file, I'm sorry - if the disk is full and software attempts to write a file anyway, corruption is likely. Take care to upload that file to wetransfer.com so you could send it to TVP staff, they often can save it.

Does TVP crash if you just create a new file and save and re-open it?

[Catriona]

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. I had two files open actually, my last, complicated, scene. They're over 3GB each. I can't get TVPaint to open in any way - by opening an existing (potentially corrupted) file, or an older, more innocent one, or just clicking on the application. It won't do any of it.

[slowtiger]

OK. Go to bed now. Tomorrow morning TVP staff will try to help.

[Catriona]

Haha, thanks. Good advice.

[Catriona]

Okay, I've made a discovery which means that all I need is for TVPaint to start working again.

It turns out that the reason for my suddenly full hard disk is that for some reason my latest backups (which I thought had silently failed) were being made inside my animation folders, and not to the external hard drive. This ever-increasing backup-within-the-backup caused the system to overload very quickly. But the brilliant news is that I have every previous iteration of my corrupted files now available to me, once I can get the software up and running again.

I only made this discovery as I was deleting the files, but fortunately the backups were backed up...!