Reproduction Steps
Download a previous version of a published place.
You may receive an error when opening.
Expected Behavior
The place will open as expected.
Actual Behavior
There will be an error message.
Issue Area: Studio
Issue Type: Crashing
Impact: High
Frequency: Sometimes
It looks like the error means that it was possible to open the file but reading the first eight bytes failed. Does the place file look like it has data? You should be able to open it in notepad (or a hex editor) and confirm it is longer than eight bytes.
Looks like all the file is is this
I downloaded it off the Place Versions tab.
I can’t reproduce this, have you tried it on a separate device or another browser?
I was using Firefox for the original test, but downloading it again on Edge gives the same result.
Hi! Sorry for the bump, but I also have this issue and I have ZERO idea on how to fix it. For reference I am downloading previous studio files on Chrome, so I doubt it’s an issue with the browser itself.
Any further information on this subject?
Can you examine the files and see if they actually contain data? As noted above this looks to be an error with the download. What would really be helpful is if you can reproduce this issue (the downloading of a bad file) or give an indication on reproduction. For instance, does the same file downloaded multiple times produce the error, or was this a one off type thing, and further downloads do not reproduce the error.
This has actually happened to the team I work in twice on places we use for building the map.
All previous versions of the place in version history when downloaded just download a 4 Byte file which can’t be opened in studio.
HOWEVER trying to edit the place works perfectly fine and you can download the current version by entering studio that way and saving a local file.
We recently switched to a new place for our map building around 2 months ago because of this issue and it solved it before it re-appeared recently so I can confirm this is still an active issue. What i’m confused about is how this randomly happens but causes ALL versions including all previous versions to return an empty 4 byte file
I have absolutely no idea what causes this but I’m sure its something regarding team create and it still actively happens today. We often have a lot of people connected in one session in these map places making a lot of changes at once (if this has anything to do with it)
This is what the files look like inside when downloaded off version history.
Note every single file looks like this inside no matter the date downloaded from.
I hope any of this info helps I can try and provide more if you have any specific questions to see what I can assist with because I would love for this issue to be resolved in the event we require to use version history in these places.
Thanks - we’d probably need to see the place in question to understand the problem better. Can you DM details of the one that’s broken so we can take a look on the backend?
Hi, this issue is still around I have opened the file in a notepad doccument and all it is showing is null.
hi there. Can you let me know how you downloaded a previous place version?
When I downloaded this, if I remember correctly, it was on the “Versions” page of the creator dashboard.
The “version history” page of creator dashboard currently only has restore button. Not sure how to download from there.
Hi there. We think we have found out the root cause of the issue. First off, please let me know if below does not describe your use case:
If above describes your scenarios. We believe all your older versions are still persisted in our system but we currently do not support direct download of place versions you gained access via “share with me” game sharing feature. While we acknowledge that this is a shortcoming in the system, please note that the download button is not supported by Roblox but third party extensions. As a result, we cannot promise a fix in the short term.
Please note that the “restore” button officially supported by Roblox is working as intended and for work around, you can ask the owner of the game to perform the download. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Thanks for the Both 1 and 2 appear to be the case for me.
I was not aware it was an extension showing the download button that is my mistake (My entire team appeared to also have the extension too so it didn’t even cross my mind). It just felt like such a handy natural feature that I just assumed it was apart of the platform rather than something added by an extension.
Though this becoming an actual feature would be useful as It is much more efficient to just download a copy of a previous version. The current process if you want to revert a specific part of the game would be: Restore to previous version → Download this version → Restore back to version it was before → Transfer and modify sections from two place files. A download would mitigate the need for double restoring in this circumstances.
Thank you for the clear-up though 
Apologies for the bump, but I am also having this exact same issue right now and I don’t know what I should be doing to resolve this.
This issue came about today when I tried to open a published place file from Studio but encountered the following error:
The affected place is this one.
I even tried downloading the place from the game page via the three dots, but I couldn’t open it and instead got a similar error like the one above. When I went to check if the downloaded file had any data, I saw that its data was null.
I was able to open this exact place fine yesterday. I don’t know what’s caused this.
What does the file look like if you open it up in a text editor?
Completely empty. Not even the word NULL is in there anywhere.
