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M
Michelle-
Participant
August 31, 2025
Question

I lost 260 pages of corrections, how to get them back?

  • August 31, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 142 views

I might have lost a huge amount of work and I’m hoping to find a solution here. I hope it’s still possible to retrieve the corrections that were made in a shared PDF document via Adobe Acrobat Web. I’ll try to describe what happened as clearly as possible:


Situation:
- My colleague, who has an Adobe Acrobat Pro subscription, uploaded a book’s PDF file and shared it with the author and me via a shared link.
- The author opened the document online in the web app, without using an Adobe account, subscription, or logging in, and made corrections to the entire book. On the first 41 pages, he added comments — these are still visible. However, from page 42 onwards, he directly edited the text itself (changing spelling and words). These direct edits have now completely disappeared.



That’s where I come in. I was asked to help ensure the author could share the corrections in such a way that we would all be able to see them.
- I asked him to download the edited PDF and send it to us, but he was not able to download the file and therefore shared the link instead.
- When my colleague and I opened the document via that link, we only saw the earlier comments; the text edits were not visible. Even though in that same file, all the edits were still visible to the author on his computer (in Adobe Acrobat Web).

 

- Following advice from Adobe’s helpdesk, I asked him to log in and go to acrobat.adobe.com/link/documents/files, to check if multiple versions of the file were available there, and if he could send them to us. However, no files were listed.
- He then also logged in within the window where the edited PDF was open, and after that the edits seemed to have disappeared permanently: only the comments remained visible, even for him.


Questions: 

A lot of work is now at risk of being lost, so any help would be greatly appreciated. I’m wondering: in what way and where could the disappeared edits be retrieved?

How is it possible that the applied text edits disappeared? And how could the author have successfully shared these corrections with us?

1 reply

S_S
Community Manager
S_SCommunity Manager
Community Manager
September 1, 2025

Hi @Michelle-,

 

Hope you are doing well. Sorry for your experience with lost edits on a PDF.

 

This happened because the author wasn't logged in to any Adobe account, and thus the server could not find a destination to save the edits.

 

If the file is still open at the author's end, and they could see the edits, I recommend trying to print the file to a PDF (if not savable from their end), and the share the new copy of the file with the group. 

 

This eliminates any kind of progress getting lost in the file.

 

Let me know how it goes.


Regards,
Souvik.

M
Michelle-Author
Participant
September 1, 2025

Dear Souvik,

Thank you for your explanation!

I now understand that the edits were not saved in the shared document because he was not logged in while making them. What still confuses me, though, is that the comments he made on the first 40 pages were saved automatically in the shared file and are visible to all of us.

 

How is it possible that the comments were saved, but the direct edits to the text were not—given that both actions were done in the same shared file while he was not logged in?

 

I will ask him to try the option you suggested, in case he can still see his edits.

If the edits also disappeared for him after logging in, which I think they did, is there any way for him to recover them?

 

Thank you in advance for your help.

S_S
Community Manager
S_SCommunity Manager
Community Manager
September 1, 2025

Hi @Michelle-,

 

A share for a review file can have anonymous reviews if shared via a public link.

 

But the same isn't the case when the author is making edits, since they do not have the direct rights to the file.

 

I am hopeful that the author has the version still available to them. If not, it will be really difficult to track back the changes made, since we will not have any trace of the edits on the server.


Regards,
Souvik.

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