\Data\.gimp\backups\.goutputstream-XXXXXX Files

[DoughyInTheMiddle]

Absolutely first time poster, but figured I'd go to the community with this because I haven't found anything Gimp related to cause this.

In the folder above, I've got about 20 files ranging from a couple that are empty, to a handful that are around 12MB in size, but half of them are around 500mb in size. My assumption is that these were times that gimp crashed and created a temporary backup, but the weird thing is that they never cleared out.

I've got 4GB of data sitting in there and just wanna make sure my assumptions are correct before I purge them.

Help appreciated in advance.

[rich2005]

I have never come across those files but there is a bug report here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/1370

A search and historically it seems more a linux problem with answers like:
"They appear to tmp files left over from file transfers. For some reason they aren't deleted, possibly because the file transfer was canceled improperly"

You need to ask yourself if you have had any issues saving files to maybe external drives or cloud storage. What was causing those crashes?

If nothing is amiss, I would delete them but keep an eye for any recurrence and make a note of what procedure you were doing when it happened.

edit: ahh back on my regular laptop - kubuntu 16.04 / Gimp 2.10.8 flatpak and I have one of those files. A quick look and it starts "gimp xcf v011" so it is a Gimp 2.10 file. Renamed to nnnnn.xcf and opened in Gimp. It contains paths that originated in a CAD application then exported as a svg. That was a week or so ago Gimp was 2.10.6 at the time. From memory no crashes, nothing unusual at the time. A mystery.

edit again: That nnnnn.xcf is 2.7 MB opened in Gimp and saved as mmmm.xcf now 3.1 MB comparing with a binary editor a big chunk of the former are zeros, some difference at the end, so a malformed xcf? That does not explain your zero length files however. Still a mystery.

The file in 'backups' seems to have an associated text file in GIMP/2.10/CrashLog/ I can not remember Gimp crashing. Gimp 2.10 has been very stable on this computer.

You could try Edit -> Preferences -> Debugging and change the policy to Never Debug Gimp See if it makes any difference over time.

[DoughyInTheMiddle]

I was working on a number of large images -- many in the neighborhood of those sizes -- that had lots of layers and transparencies that kept crashing Gimp. I was figuring it might have been some sort of temp file but wasn't certain.

I moved them out of my Dropbox at home and into a local folder to conserve space and will check that folder the next time a large image crashes.