An error occurred while reading the file, see log, etc.

Alien Alloy

Greetings.

I was working on a project just few minutes ago: done a test render to see the result, saved the project and then closed Daz to reboot the machine.
Upon loading Daz and then the project file I am greet with that "an error occurred blah blah".

In the log file this appears

2021-06-16 15:46:07.704     Json Parser (1717443,10): Unexpected character

Please... Please tell me that I don't have to redo the whole project from scraps ...

Note: I did try to do the "merge" but it give me the same issue non the less.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Richard Haseltine

Check the .duf file with an archive tool, such as 7Zip. If, as I suspect, it's a bad compression you may be able to fix with an archive mangement tool.

Alien Alloy

Richard Haseltine said:

Check the .duf file with an archive tool, such as 7Zip. If, as I suspect, it's a bad compression you may be able to fix with an archive mangement tool.

According to 7Zip and WinRar, the file has no error.

This archive management tool, is something inside 7zip or winrar or is something else entirely?
Thanks in advance :)

Richard Haseltine

No, but I believe (without ever having tried) that there are tools to repair broken archives. If there were no errors reported you could try extracting the .duf file and inspect it for obvious breakages (e.g. unclosed brackets).

Alien Alloy

Richard Haseltine said:

No, but I believe (without ever having tried) that there are tools to repair broken archives. If there were no errors reported you could try extracting the .duf file and inspect it for obvious breakages (e.g. unclosed brackets).

Been checking it with Ultra Edit, but he cannot detect any missing brackets.

ALso there are more than 50k lines and checking every single one will be madness :(

Richard Haseltine

Yes, you can't really go line by line, but checking that the main blocks look intact and brackets tally should be a good start.

Have you tried opening the decompressed version in DS?.

Alien Alloy

Richard Haseltine said:

Yes, you can't really go line by line, but checking that the main blocks look intact and brackets tally should be a good start.

Have you tried opening the decompressed version in DS?.

Yes and it failed.

But dunno how, don't ask me I managed to fix it.

Using Ultra Edit to upen the uncompressed file and checking that value the log gave me I found a line where instead of a series of number, there was gibberish.
By fixing that and saving the file on a new one, renaming it with .duf - Daz was able to read it back and it was all there.

I did some test, saved a copy too in case of disaster and so far, all is well.

Thanks for the advice tho, I wouldn't have went that route without our help!

Richard Haseltine

Ah, good - sounds like it was a compression issue but fortunately one that could be recovered. I don't knoww hat causes these, HD/SSD hiccough or utility software causing a glitch seem obvious suspects (and I would suggest checking the drive health).