Elements missing on file reopen - Illustrator on macOS

Forum|Forum|12 days ago
March 24, 2026
3 replies
33 views

I was working on a 100 page document with mainly simple vector stuff (no complicated fills or brushes). I shut down for the weekend. Monday morning I restart my work and about 70% of all the work has gone. But it's random. Outlines gone on some pages, not on others. Contents of full pages (50 or so pages) gone, with only the frame and page title still there. 8 sketches on one page are ok - with just one sketch in the middle gone. Line sketches gone, leaving just the solid colour fills. Just completely random. It would have taken me 20 minutes to have selected it all and deleted it.

In 30 years on illustrator, I have not seen this problem. Corrupted files that wont open, I have seen. But not this random missing stuff. Original document was 830 mb. The bad doc is now 200 mb.

Luckily I use apple time machine. So I have a backup from Friday end of the day. Which I have picked up again. All seems fine.

So is this just a bad document ? Corrupt preferences file? It's now deleted - but I dont want this to happen again. Have I added a corrupt element? Imported a bad jpeg? I dont know.

Any ideas? And any fixes to ensure no repeats (apart from application reset which I have done.)

P

project77Author

Participating Frequently

Saving to local Mac HD as I have done for the last 30 years.

Background saving is now off - but it has been on for the last 10 years with no problem and I work on ai every day.

Mac M1 with up to date OS 26.3.1 ai up to date 30.2.1

Since the last couple updates mac gives a security waring requiring that I accept that ai access data from other apps. This is a recent update in ai. I have been accepting. I will stop accepting.

No new apps, 3rd party stuff, new gizmos - I keep a reasonably clean machine. Only major software is kept up to date. No plugins.

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @project77

Thanks for sharing the details. Could you try enabling Full Disk Access for Illustrator in System Preferences, then relaunching Illustrator to see if that helps?

Looking forward to hearing from you.
Anubhav

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @project77

I’m sorry to hear about your experience. Could you kindly confirm the version of the OS/Illustrator installed and the folder location where you saved the files, so we can better assist you?

Looking forward to hearing from you.
Anubhav