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willnic
Advocate II
Advocate II

PBIX file corrupted

I worked on a model last week where I added some calculations. Now when I try to open it up I get the error message saying "Unable to Open Document" with the file past listed, saying it is "corrupt or not a valid report file."

 

The only changes I made to the file were calculations and everything was working. I can even see that it saved properly based on the timestamp on the file.

 

I really don't want to have to rebuild this model -- any way I can save this?

49 REPLIES 49
remi
Advocate II
Advocate II

hello @Greg_Deckler,

 

Do we have a cause for this behavior of the pbix file?

Or some recommendations of how to treat it in order to avoid falling into this scenario.

 

Thank you!

Remi

Celia
Regular Visitor

It's happened to me as well. Basically my two days work. I cannot believe PowerBI is such a unreliable product.

This just happened to me again.  I would have to say it does not happen too much, but when it does it is really frustrating.   I get the approach of saving often, so you don’t lose too much work and I will take this approach when I am in full data model development for now on as I lost about 3 days of work.

 

We really need an answer as to why it occurs.   I opened the pbix file as a zip file and it revealed that the data model file had a bad CRC.   Many of the files were missing based on looking at a previous version that was still

operational.    It did not throw any error on the save.  Why are there no checks on the file after it is saved?

 

Please fix this or provide better approach to keeping this from happening!!   I like Power BI and where it is going but these issues can be showstoppers. 

StefanVerwey
Regular Visitor

It seems to use ONLY "Save As" and each time save it to a new date and time stamped file.

Each Saved version will give you the certainty of a good saved version.
Tip, Save and Close Power BI several times during the say versus several Saved files can carry a corrupt status.
By opening regularly a saved version and later on saving it to a new time stamped file and close you Desktop, seems to be the safer way to compile PBIX files.
PBIX files seem to be VERY flaky.

Files name example: "name yyyymmdd hhmm.pbix"
This will also help to keep your files in a descending order and easy to get to the latest version

anjanapradeep
New Member

Please give a solution for this issue.

 

All what I did is changed the source of the data and tried to refresh the file.

I saved and closed it.

 

Next time when i tried to open it ...its showing me this error.!!

 

 

I had this problem today. Fortunately I published the report with almost all of my work the previous day, so I just downloaded the report from the Power BI online app and refreshed. This would lose any measures created since the previous publish, but serves as a backup.

 

So, if you have not published your work, it might be a best practice to do so regularly as it serves as a backup.

My machine crashed yesterday when I had a pbix file open and it corrupted the file. Luckily, the most important pieces had been published last week but this still sucks. It sounds like files can corrupt for almost no reason. Ugh.

ttinsley
Resolver I
Resolver I

Just occurred for me as well

reading about all these corrupted PBIX files is making me nervous.  So don't we have an auto shadow backup feature in Win 10 we can restore with??  ....  have never spent much time with the OS - but this is going to inspire me to do so.....

 

 

www.CahabaData.com

Is this still an ongoing bug.  Could it be caused by the data source rather than the powerbi saved file.

 

I have rebuilt a query today and saved it twice to try and over come it bugging out again but both have bugged out.

It is really frustrating that this keeps happening.  

I'm getting this message with the custom visuals that I download and try to open.  Luckily my own reports are unaffected at the moment.

Salty_Sea_Dog
Frequent Visitor

I had the same problem with my pbix file connected to a SSAS tabular cube. After I restared the service the problem resolved. I had checked my gateway to see if it was a network issue and sure enough that was it.

Joe
Advocate II
Advocate II

This is the second time it has happended. If I create about about 5 or 6 measures the file gets corrupted. Looks like a bug .

Yeah, I had it happen again too. This time it occurred after PowerBI Desktop locked up while saving and I had to force quit. When I tried to re-open the file was corrupt.The first time it happened it with no warning (I didn't force quit out of the file).

If misery loves company, it got me today too.

This happened to me once. Now, I keep multiple copies of each file. I have one on the server, one on the jump drive and one in the group folder. I work with one and then replace the others slowly and on different days maintaining new versions separately.  Rebuilding one data set was all it took for me to learn that it is easier to save multiples than to recreate. Redundant copies seem antiquated but I am a believer.





Did I answer your question? Mark my post as a solution!

Proud to be a Super User!




Yeah, I've been in that situation (keep multiple backups) with other tools when they were in their early stages, but I'm out of practice. Guess what's old is new again.

 

If it sheds any light on the problem, when I copied the .pbix to a .zip file, the "DataMashup" file was the one that Windows reported as corrupt...but excluding it from a new .zip archive didn't save me either.


Back to square 1.

I tried the following on a corrupted file, and it worked.

Install WINRAR. 

Open WINRAR.

Navigate to your pbix file within WINRAR and select it.

On the menu bar click Tools>  Repair Archive. 

Select location to save. 

 

I've managed to successfully repair 2 corrupted pbix files this way. 

 

No luck with WinRar or any of the other .zip repair tools that I've tried. Glad it got you out of the weeds, though. Good tip to try, should it happen again. Thanks!

This just happened to me at a very inconvenient time when dealing with measures...
Any updates on how to uncorrupt?

Any update or fixes available on this issue?

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