Can't copy and paste, can't see my work.

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
June 2, 2025
3 replies
183 views

I have a file with 5 artboards on it. I have work on three of the boards plus in the open space. All of the work dissapeared, but still shows up when the mouse is on a portion of the work. The layers window still shows all the work and it is in color but currently it's all invisible. How do I fix this? I tried to copy and paste is to a new file and it gave me a message of "Cant copy the objects. There isnt enough memory. ID-108"

How-to

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @Clayton_Shepard8827,

Sorry you're running into this! Based on what you shared, it sounds like the artwork is still there but not rendering properly, especially since you can see outlines when hovering and everything still appears in the Layers panel. Could you let me know which version of Illustrator you're using and what operating system you're on?

Try going to View > Preview on CPU to check if the artwork becomes visible again. If that helps, it's likely a GPU rendering issue. If you're on macOS, you can also go to Preferences > Performance and turn off GPU Performance, then reopen the file to see if that resolves it.

Regarding the 'not enough memory' error when copying, Illustrator might be having trouble with a complex or slightly corrupted element. Also, are you saving the file to a local drive, external drive, network, or cloud location? If it's not local, try saving it to your system drive. You can also try doing a Save As and check the option 'Save each artboard to a separate file' to isolate and recover content from each artboard individually, as Ton suggested.

Let me know how it goes.

Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Abhishek