Hi everyone !

First of all, I am french and I am only an occasional Inkscape user.
Then, English it's not my native language so all mistakes in grammar and/or spelling are mines.

I bet I am not in the good section to post this topic, but I am not sure of what's really needs to be reported or not to the developer.
I am sorry for that, but I am done and very tired to searching everywhere even if I read english pretty well.
It's not this easy when you are not a native speaker. Plus I know nothing about XML program lines.
So I will try to explain my problem the best I can :

My boss asked me to create a little threefold informational leaflet for my colleagues. I am not a professional graphic designer and I use Inkscape mainly for occasional family creations like wedding invitations, simple business cards, etc... for a private use and with my own computer.

Usually I use some "free of use" vectorial backgrounds or brochures layout files with .ai or .svg extension and I change it according to my taste.
All these files are verified and come from serious web site. The files I used for this particular work has all been bought with Fotolia.

Whatever, I almost finished my edition by lunch time. The file has well been saved under a Inkscape file with a .svg extension.
I opened and closed it many times with no problem during the morning. I even exported it as a .png file with a 600 dpi resolution to have a good quality preview of the final layout. It's what I usually do to avoid the complete vectorization of the text blocks.
The final file is very stunning and you can convert it easily with Adobe Acrobat to print it.

But when I wanted to open my original Inkscape file afterward, I had a very unpleasant surprise :

The file opens with no problem, but it is totally blank despite his weight of 9 Mo.
The document still with the dimensions I made it but there is no layout sheets anymore.
When I closed it I seen the preview icon had a big red block in the white background.
I made a right click on the file and then in the "quick look" option and it tell the following message :

"This page contain the following errors :
error on line 818 at column 9 : invalid character in attribute value
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error".

So my questions are :

1- Is a "backup" or a "debug" of my file possible knowing his weight seems heavy if it's really blank ?

2- Did someone know how to process with my material which is a Mac Book Pro with OS X Yosemite version 10.10.4 ?
the version of Inkscape is 0.91.

3- Is this kind of bug recurrent and how to avoid it ?

Thank you very much to anyone would be kind enough to give me some tip.
I would be very annoyed to reedit all the layout.
See you.

Please open your file with a text editor. Look at the end of your file. Does it end with </svg>? Can you paste the last 50 or so letters here?

(This may be a known bug where Inkscape does not save the file completely when you close the program before saving is finished.
Activate autosave via Edit -> Preferences -> Input/Output -> Autosave to prevent loosing things in the future).

If you send us the file or upload it somewhere, we might be able to fix it.

Moini wrote:Please open your file with a text editor. Look at the end of your file.

or jump to line 818 and look for the 9th character.
maybe there's an é or some other diacritic that causes some problem.

You could try to drag and drop to your favorite web browser and see what happens.
If you rename the file from .svg to .xml the browser should tell you if it's a valid xml file (a SVG should be a valid xml otherwise something bad happened when saving)

Or upload it somewhere and we'll check it.

I can't help with this at all. But I wanted to try and comfort you -- it's a good sign that the file has weight. That means the content, or at least most of the content, is probably still there.

And also I echo - if you can share the SVG file, these guys will be able to help. If there's a copyright or license issue, maybe you could upload it somewhere, only long enough for us to download. Then you can delete it (from the host, I mean). Or possibly someone might be willing to contact you via email?