Help. Illustrator has become unusable.

Question

I have been making relatively large fills (wiring diagrams) in Illustrator and saving them to Dropbox.  When I am done with the file, I save it as an SVG 1.1 and upload it to Claude for some code modifications.  Recently, when I tried to open the files, I got all kinds of things happening.  Most of the diagram will disappear, and I'll get black squares on the screen. While that has been horrible (I had to completely redo files, and then the new file loses 95% of the work), I made a relatively simple file last night. Saved it on my local drive, and when I go to Illustrator, I can do nothing with it.  Layers are not locked.  Nothing has changed.  A file saved as an .AI has become completely unusable.  Does anyone have a suggestion?  Is my computer about to blow or what?  I've uninstalled and reinstalled.  I run a virus scan.  I am at a loss.

Bobby Henderson · Answer

Always keep an original version of your artwork saved in Illustrator .AI format. Only save copies of the artwork in other formats, be it PDF, EPS, SVG or whatever. If any further editing is needed to be done to the file the native .AI file will be more reliable at opening in an edit-friendly condition. The SVG format is very tricky. Multiple flavors of it exist, some of which are deprecated (or obsolete). There seems to be little agreement across the computing industry on which flavor of SVG to properly support. Certain features and effects in Adobe Illustrator will be flattened or expanded when the artwork is saved in SVG format. SVG does not support all the features and effects in Adobe Illustrator.

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