Constant Illustrator Crashes with no Recovery

I think many users are missing the real issue being discussed here.

I fully understand that Recovery Data is not the same thing as manually saving a file. That is not my complaint.

My complaint is that Illustrator offers an option called "Automatically Save Recovery Data", allows me to set an interval, and then often fails to recover the work that was supposedly being protected.

When Photoshop crashes, it usually opens a separate recovered file containing the progress that was automatically saved before the crash. It may not be perfect, but most of the time you can continue working without losing hours of work.

With Illustrator, my experience has been very different.

After a crash, Illustrator simply reopens the document from the last manual save point, as if the recovery data never existed. The result is that hours of work can disappear, even though the recovery feature was enabled and configured correctly.

What frustrates me is not the crash itself. Software crashes happen.

What frustrates me is that Illustrator presents a recovery feature that gives users a reasonable expectation that recent work is being protected, but after a crash there is often nothing meaningful to recover.

And before anyone says that I should save more often, create backup files, or press Ctrl+S every few minutes: that completely misses the point.

If Illustrator did not offer a recovery system, I would accept full responsibility for every unsaved change.

But it does offer a recovery system.

The entire purpose of that feature is to protect users from unexpected crashes and human error. If the application crashes, recovery data exists, and yet hours of work are still lost, then it is fair to ask why the feature is not working as users reasonably expect it to.

At that point the problem is no longer user behavior. The problem is confidence in the recovery system itself.

Recovery is not Autosave. Won't ever be.

Illustrator should not crash and that is something that should be addressed. I'm pretty sure that staff will chime in soon to help you with that.

BUT: you have to come up with a backup process. You have to save regularly. And also make backup copies (save with a different name on a different hard disk). If a crash happens while Illustrator is writing its recovery file, then the recovery file will be corrupted. If a crash happens while Illustrator is saving your file, your file will be gone. You want to be prepared for that.