Participant

Question

How do I recover files after a crash that simply didn't open?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
November 21, 2024
33 replies
42809 views

i was working in illustrator (beta) 29.3.0 when it crashed. upon reopening it, i got a popup that it recovered the two opened files. i hit 'confirm' to open the recovered files, then nothing happened. can i recover them manually somehome?

A

Allie26498899w186

Participant

I have lost 8 files and over 20 hours of work and some of these files WERE saved locally but are broken now. Please help

A

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @Allie26498899w186,

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you're facing. Could you please share a few details about how and where the files were saved or edited? For instance, were there any unexpected Illustrator crashes, sudden app closures, system shutdowns, or power outages during the editing process?
This will help us better understand the situation and assist you more effectively.

Looking forward to your response.
Anubhav

R

radoslawm47888915

Participant

The problem still persists, I just lost 3 hours of work, and upon opening Illustrator, I received a "Print.ai" file that was completely empty. When will Adobe address this issue? The current autosave functionality is useless, whereas it worked well in older versions. Does Adobe even acknowledge the need to address this problem, or will they pretend nothing is wrong and that the issue lies with the user?

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Alecat

Participant

Argh... the excellent file recovery of prior versions of Illustrator trained me into some pretty bad habits, and while I've been trying to unlearn those bad habits the lack of the safety net has become very noticable!

File Recovery used to work perfectly through battery failure and crashes, now I'm finding that files go completely unrecovered or the recovery files being offered to me on start-up are ones from a previous session, not the most recently "lost" files.

I'd very much like to see some improvements here, thank you.

HARSHIKA_VERMA

Community Manager

Hi there,

We are sorry for the frustration. Would you mind sharing the Illustrator file with Anubhav so we can share it with the team for investigation and recovery?

Note: Please upload the Illustrator file to a shared location such as Dropbox and share the URL via private message.

We will try our best to help.

Thanks,

Harshika

F

Fiamma127

Participating Frequently

Hola, tengo un problema con Adobe Illustrator, no funciona el autosave/autoguardado.

Cada vez que el programa se cierra por un fallo o error y no llegue a guardar los ultimos progresos de mi trabajo Illustrator me muestra un cartel que avisa de que hay archivos recuperados, cuando le doy a "aceptar" el archivo no se abre ni siquiera cuando lo busco en su carpeta predeterminada de autosave, lo unico que me aparecen son archivos con la terminación ".AISHM" que no se pueden abrir ni hacer nada.
He perdido un monton de trabajos por no poder recuperar los autoguardados de illustrator.

¿Que puedo hacer? ¿A alguien le sucede lo mismo? ¿Hay solución?

A

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @Fiamma127,

I'm sorry to hear about your experience. Currently, it's not possible to recover from *.aishm files. We understand this may not be the ideal outcome, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused.

To avoid similar situations in the future, we advise saving multiple copies of your active work locally or saving them as cloud documents.

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any further questions or need assistance. We're here to help.

Anubhav

T

Tommy St

Known Participant

I would appreciate some kind of confirmation from Adobe regarding the erronious pop up stating your file has been recovered when no file has actually been recovered, along with an acknowledgement that the current functionality of the auto "recovery" feature is prone to failure. If possible, I would like to request that the auto recovery feature be changed so that it actually backs up a copy of your current file, and not just save impractical aishm files.

F

Fiamma127

Participating Frequently

Hola, tengo un problema con Adobe Illustrator, no funciona el autosave/autoguardado.

Cada vez que el programa se cierra por un fallo o error y no llegue a guardar los ultimos progresos de mi trabajo Illustrator me muestra un cartel que avisa de que hay archivos recuperados, cuando le doy a "aceptar" el archivo no se abre ni siquiera cuando lo busco en su carpeta predeterminada de autosave, lo unico que me aparecen son archivos con la terminación ".AISHM" que no se pueden abrir ni hacer nada.
He perdido un monton de trabajos por no poder recuperar los autoguardados de illustrator.

¿Que puedo hacer? ¿A alguien le sucede lo mismo? ¿Hay solución?

kglad

Community Expert

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from cc desktop bugs">

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Tommy St

Known Participant

Though not as bad as many others in this thread, I just lost 3 hours of work from Illustrator crashing.

Every time Illustrator has crashed in the past few months, it says it has recovered from a crash and will now open the recovered file, and the has failed to reopen anything except the most recent manual save I've made. This effectively means that the "Automatically Save Recovery Data" is completely useless. I don't know if the issue is that I changed the folder location of the automaticlly saved recovery data or if there was a change in one of the recent updates.

Also, before someone chimes in "that's not how file recovery works" or "you should save more often", please don't. We want it to work a specific way. We are paying hundreds of dollars annually for this software with the idea that the future updates would improve the it and issues that the community calls out would be fixed.

For anyone who wants an acutal solution to this problem try Autosaviour by Astute Graphics. It's a free plugin that automatically saves your file the way you'd expect Illustrator to. I used to turn it off since the automatic saves would interrupt my workflow, but now since the data recovery *does not work* I'm turning it back on again. Better to be briefly interrupted than lose hours of work. Add it to the list of essential plugins that Astute has for Illustrator, filling the gaps that Adobe ignores.

https://astutegraphics.com/plugins/autosaviour

Miko VIcin

Participant

Thanks a lot for this comment. I really dislike when people say "you should save more often" People don't intentional do not save. We are just engrossed in the work and forget once in a while. It's a feature that should be working perfectly. But it doesn't. It was good before with .aid but they have made it worse. Thank you for the suggestion again. I will try it out

Monika Gause

Community Expert

@Miko VIcin schrieb:

We are just engrossed in the work and forget once in a while. It's a feature that should be working perfectly.

That should not happen. Make it a habit to save.

A feature like this will never be 100% reliable, because that's just not how computers operate. A power outage or a hardware failure can ruin everything at any time. And that's why it's not even sufficient to save regularly. You also have to make backups regularly on external hardware. Not doing so is just not sustainable.

The Hanna

Participant

Hi there!

I was working in Illustrator at my MacBook Pro and then the battery suddelnly turned it off. When I turned it on again (imedietaly) the document was gone, only the old document version was there and could be redone/recovered. But the document that I didn't saved is gone.

Is it possible to get it back?

Have looked at the datarecovery folder and it just have some aishm-files that I dont know what to do with.

Thankful for all help.

Hannah, Sweden.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

There have been many issues reported with those files lately. You will most probably not get it back.

It's best to save your files regularly to not get into a situation where you need to rely on file recovery. It's not made for that.

The Hanna

Participant

I'm very careful with that and always try to save my documents as often as I possibly can. But sometimes thing happends. And therefore these files are nessecary. I don't think people would use this files just for fun, or make recovery just for fun either. These files are needed, and not something you just "rely" on.

Deidra_Adams

Participant

I have the same issue with version 29.3. It shows the pop up that it recovered the files, but never opens them. I looked in the location of where to find the files but there are no files with an .ai or .aid extension, just random text files that look like jiberish. The crash happened when I tried to save the file as a CC version.

Kevin McMahon

Known Participant

Not an improvement - a disaster. No .aid files to open. Lost hours of work and Illustrator no longer stable (crashed 2 days in a row on new Macbook Pro.) Ugh.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

@Kevin McMahon schrieb:

Not an improvement - a disaster. No .aid files to open. Lost hours of work and Illustrator no longer stable (crashed 2 days in a row on new Macbook Pro.) Ugh.

The stability would need to be addressed - the usual suspect would be a computer that doesn't get regular reboots as well as a corrupt preferences file.

I would try that for a start.

But then: file recovery is the icing on the cake when you are saving files regularly AND make backups - preferably on external harddisks. File recovery is not a backup solution and it is not meant to save your files automatically. It will not do either of this reliably.

Kevin McMahon

Known Participant

Yeah. To explain a bit more, 28 years of working with Illustrator here (clients include Adobe) and teaching it the entire time as well. Also, working on a new MacBook Pro. Auto-recovery worked fine for the last decade. This is a new behavior caused by a misguided "improvement" - creating the least stable version of Illustrator I have worked with.

D

defaultyslffg7sa2qd

Participant

Hi, my illustrator file crashed, and I forced quit thinking that it's been saved. But when reopened, the progress was lost and there are no .aid recovery files available, but only .aishm files which cant be opened.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

There are currently more issues with it than have before.

It was never a good idea to rely on it. Better save your work, because the app won't do it for you. And when you have saved, make a backup copy. On an external drive.

J

Jaden36692273ukcq

Participant

So basically when I click the 'home' button at the top left corner of Illustrator and return to the file after a few seconds, the recent progress (unsaved, but usually switching to 'home' then returning to the file won't result in a file loss, right??) of my file was gone, totally disappeared. This is a part of my school project and I felt frustrated because the recovery file can't be opened either. it is in some kind of '.aishm' format. Can anyone recover my file through .aishm? thanks.

Link to the original .ai file and .aishm file: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mysanT21TFqNB7tHHN8b7iXULhENHH8n?usp=sharing

Monika Gause

Community Expert

I hope that the Illustrator team can help.

But apart from that: since you are still learning, make it a habit to save your files regularly and make backups regularly. No application will reliably save your files for you.