Illustrator file got damaged after the power outage

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
January 23, 2026
3 replies
102 views

Hello. I was working on a document in Illustrator. I decided to go and save it. At the exact time the saving was initiated, my electricity went off. After i had power back, i loaded Illustrator, the window with the recovered files popped up but i pressed "cancel" because i made another successful save just a minutes prior to that one when the electricity went down. I tried to open that file from a folder and after it was loaded, all the work was gone. There was only one artboard left with some random shape. I see that the size of the file is still around 6mb but it appears empty. Is there any possible way to restore that data? I've lost 10h of work, its so frustrating.
Also i can not attact the file here, it says that the content of the file is different from it's extension.
Thank you.

CarlosCanto

Community Expert

this won't help you at all with your current situation but 10 hours without saving is asking for trouble, try saving more often. I've lost work due to power outage as well, after wasting time and effort redoing lost work it was easy to get into the habit of pressing Ctrl/Cmd + S, right after doing anything that was worth not having to redo.

A

Anonymous

I make saves after all the minor changes because i know that the power may go down at any minute (i live in Ukraine, we have a very bad situation with electricity due to the war activities). And it seems like it didnt really help

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Your file is damaged to a degree where only the Illustrator team can even try.

As I mentioned above: just one copy of a file is no sufficient.

D

doug36558401od39

Participant

What have you done to trouble shoot the issue?
Placed it in indesign and exported a new pdf?
Is there a tmp file you can open.
Try and zip the file and upload it.

A

Anonymous

Just posted the dropbox link to the file above.
I dont see any .tmp files and also i dont have InDesign unfortunatelly

Monika Gause

Community Expert

So it's a recovery file that isn't working? Most probably the Illustrator team will answer this thread. They are the only ones who even have a chance to rescue this kind of files. But do not put too much hope into it.

Crash while saving almost certainly can ruin any file. That's why it's important to not keep only one backup copy of your file, but multiple.

A

Anonymous

The original version of the file (not the recovery one) got damaged. Because i already saved that file before the crash, i was sure that it will be opened with just a few unsaved details, thats why i pressed "cancel" in the recovery window.

Here's that file actually:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/eoeliu95ho4k8qbgc7dqd/ZP19078.ai?rlkey=u17wd27lyehsrkb2f59pq0hg8&st=aue1ik5h&dl=0

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