Forum Discussion
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?
51 Replies
I had this problem occur to me too on the April 2020 version "pbix is corrupt or an invalid report file".... none of the solutions I found on this community worked. The solution that worked for me and saved me alot of heartache at losing all my work was navigating to the following folder and then reopening a previous version - C:\Users\*yourusername*\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Power BI Desktop\TempSaves. Hope this helps someone too!
How do we mark this as a solution. This saved me all kinds of work. Thank you!
I deleted my cache files right before I saw this. This is happening on multiple files. I right clicked power bi desktop and went to app settings and turned off Background apps under app permissions and they are now working.
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).
I should also note that I logged a ticket and they have been investigating my file but can't find a solution to resurrect it. I ended up having to rebuild.
You can try copying it and changing the file extension to ".zip" and you might be able to salvage something. I've only run into file corruption once when switching back and forth between Excel 2016 and Excel 2013. Spent quite a bit of time rebuilding that one...
Thanks for the idea -- tried that with no luck, I still get the same error message unfortunately.
I guess I should have probably elaborated on the idea a little. The thought was that you could copy the first file to a zip file. Create another new PBIX file, rename that to a zip. Go into the first zip and copy out certain files like "Data Model" and paste into your new zip folder, rename the zip to pbix and see if you can open it.
Long shot, but might work.
Hello together,
I've meet such issue before. And I try to right click the file, then choose [Restore previous versions], and it shows the older version saved before and can be opened successfully. It works for me. Hope it may help you.
Nice! Helped here!
Tks
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
April 2018, this also happend to me. One day of work in the ballance.
Any new solution? None of the above worked. And why does this happen? I saved the file with no problems. Then it was impossible to reopen and no recoverable versions where available even thou the auto recovery was enabled.
Thanks.
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.
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.....
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.
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.
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 versionIt'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.
