Photoshop: Error when saving files on a server

Whenever we investigate these cases, we find that they are due to bugs on the server or in the OS code working with the server -- that's one of the reasons why we don't officially support opening or saving to a server.

Of course, when we save to our own AFP or SMB servers - we don't see such problems.

Some off brand servers have had odd issues, servers can have bad configuration or permission issues that cause problems, and we have found more than a few OS bugs when working with some types of file servers.

In your case, since 2 applications can't save to your server - I would suspect a problem with the server, or another MacOS bug.

Thanks for the follow up. To be specific, there's nothing off brand about our server. We it's a Mac Pro running Mac OS X Server 10.6.8. And we have a 48TB drive attached to that. Nothing unusual, nothing weird.

I also mislead you by bringing up After Effects. We don't actually have any problems with After Effects except for the documented and well understood limitation of AE CS 5.5 +. The bug is that Apple hasn't upgraded the QuickTime 7 architecture to 64bit, but when AE went full 64 bit they had to use a new API from Apple. Sadly this new API doesn't support writing QT files larger than 2GB to an AFP volume. Everybody else is having this same problem (in our case RedCine X is the other program that's driving us nuts with this problem).

So yes, this is frustrating, and it's mostly Apple's fault. That being said, Adobe needs to work around this limitation. Older versions of AE could write large QT files to AFP because they are using a (now depreciated) API. So until Apple fixes it on their end, Adobe needs to recognize when the user is writing a QT movie to an AFP server and revert to their pre CS 5 code base.

So the AE bug is NOT related to our server config. And in my opinion neither is this PS bug. In fact, if I restart Photoshop CS 6, and write to an AFP volume, it works fine, but give it an hour or so and suddenly I can't write ANYTHING to an AFP volume I get the following error "Could not save as [filename] because of a program error." The only solution is to save all my unsaved files to a local drive, quit PS, re-open PS re-open my docs, and then re-save them to the AFP volume. I have to repeat this nonsense ever hour or so, which is really putting a damper on our workflow.

My Photoshop is doing it right now, is there a log file or something I can send your way?

We've documented several similar bugs for Apple.
We are attempting work arounds for them, and CS6 contains yet more workarounds.
One thing you can try is turning of thumbnails in preferences, as most of the OS filesystem bugs we've seen involve the resource fork - and not writing thumbnails will minimize use of the resource fork.

I have the same exact issue ONLY with Photoshop. If you do a new file, it will save fine. If you rename the file in the save dialogue, it saves fine... but try to save the file again after saving it once and it will give you a permissions error. This only happens in PS and no other Adobe product. The only variable here is Photoshop upon resaving a file on the server. What I do is either save the file to the desktop and drag it back to the server, overriding the old file... OR, add a "xxx" at the end of the filename in the save as dialogue... wait for it to save THEN go to the server, delete the old file and remove the "xxx" from the filename. It is infuriating to have to do all this just to save a damned file every single time you save it. Like the other commenter. If I restart photoshop, the problem goes away momentarily... until PS decides it wants to kick you in the workflow-nuts and start doing it again. It does it whether the file is selected on the finder or not selected. I'm running Mojave, but it's been doing it for over a year if not 2 years at this point. I have lost track how long this issue has been killing my productivity and patience.

try the 10.8.2 update just released by Apple.
They fixed a few bugs relating to network saves.

Let us know if it helps you Jeremy!

Which OS version are you using?
Apple just fixed some bugs in 10.8.2 related to saving to file server.

Older OS versions still have some known OS filesystem bugs when writing to fileservers (but especially SMB).

Please see above: so far all the problems we have found have been with the OS or server, and we are constantly trying to work around the known OS bugs.