In krita when you save your work on the open file page it shows the currently saved version and a grey un-clickable previously saved version underneath. I accidentally saved the current work and need to access the previously saved file which I can clearly see with the time it was saved. How can I open this file?
Thank you.

This is the backup file created by krita which suggests that you had some kind of crash or problem in krita. Its purpose is to keep your image data safe in case of problems and it's created due to an option in Settings -> Configure Krita -> General -> Miscellaneous. In order to keep it safe, krita won't open it and I'm surprised that you can even see it listed greyed out in krita (this may be an option or setting that I'm not aware of).

At the OS level, you can rename the 'image.kra~' file as 'image.kra' then krita will open it.

If you want to be able to go back to a previous stage of work (such as if you've made a serious and complicated mistake or whatever), you can regularly use the Save Incremental Backup option (press F4) instead of Save. This will give you a sequence of auto-numbered versions of your filename (with a '~' in the middle of the name, not at the end) which krita can see and open as a sort of development history record in case you want to go back to one of them.

See: https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/w ... ght=backup (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Save Incremental Version is very similar but slightly different as you can read in the manual. The thing to do is to try them and see which method works best for you.

Thank you for your reply I would like to try to change the file name in the OS do you know how this is done?

Whatever Operating System you have, you open the File Explorer/Manager (whatever it's called) so you can navigate to the folder that the file is in and see the list of all the files there. Then you right click the file you want to rename and then choose 'Rename' from the list of options presented. The filename will then be highlighted for editing its name. (To change the file extension, i.e. whatever.kra~, you'll have to click your cursor in the filename then move the cursor to the end and backspace it to remove the ~ character) Then edit the file name to be what you want it to be and then press the Return key. The filename will then be what you have changed it to be.