Known Participant

Question

Illustrator files are becoming corrupted while saving

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
October 19, 2025
2 replies
356 views

I'm starting to get fed up with Illustrator and Photoshop. In the past month, I have had issues where files take 20 minutes to save and issues where the program just stops opening a file, forcing me to try opening the file several times before it actually opens. Now, a file I literally JUST saved, which again took 5 minutes to save (after making one small change since the previous save), is corrupted for some reason. I have been working on this figure for the whole week, and now I am going to have to start all over again.

Is this something wrong with the latest update? Because from what I have seen on the forums, saving and opening issues have been coming up a lot. I'm beginning to wonder why I am paying so much for a program "subscription" when it's causing me so many issues trying to get my PhD thesis done. Is there a way to get the figure an all the layers back? Or am I going to have to resort to getting Affinity Designer instead?

Thanks

B

Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

How fast/good is your Internet connection? If you're trying to save artwork to a cloud-based location while the design is in progress the Internet connection needs to be really solid. Otherwise the act of saving files to the cloud only can be a risky move. I have really good Internet connections both at work and at home (over 1 Gigabit per second) and I still don't trust actively saving work in progress to the cloud. I prefer saving the work on local hard discs.

M

MADPResearchAuthor

Known Participant

Hello Bobby,

I don't save files to the cloud. Most of the work I am doing involves landscape photogrammetry, and so I need massive storage volumes. I'm saveing to my 24 TB hard drive in my home desktop.

Thanks.

B

Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

Then, like Monika asked earlier, how big are the files? Hundreds of megabytes big or even more than a gigabyte?

Also, are the Illustrator layouts large format in nature? If the document page is really big what kind of raster effects setting is applied to the document? For instance if I create a vehicle wrap design at full size in Illustrator I'm going to use a lower raster effects setting, such as 72ppi. If I use a default setting of 300ppi meant for ordinary paper page sizes the wrap design may be a lot bigger in terms of file size and performance demands on the computer.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

This is a public forum, the people who you are mostly talking to, are volunteers.

Which system is it, how large are your files, exactly where are you saving them, what is in your files?

What can help:

- save to your desktop, not on a server.

- turn on the printer. If you do not have a printer, set up a PDF printer.

- check all your fonts.

- check if your font management is compatible with Illustrator.

- turn off "Save in background"

and of course:

- check your hard disk for corruption

M

MADPResearchAuthor

Known Participant

Hello Monika,

I am running a Threadripper 3790x 32 Core, 256 GB RAM, Radeon 6900 XT graphics card, and the hard drive that the file is on is a two week old 24 TB BarraCuda 3.5" SATA drive with 512 MB Cache. The file size is ~12 GB.

I have no fonts in the file.

Why would having the printer on while working on a file prevent corruption? That doesn't make any sense.

Thanks.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Illustrator saves information about the printer into the file. When opening a file it searches for the printer. When saving a file, it searches for the printer. There are a lot of known cases in which Windows updates messed with the printer setings and Illustrator suddenly got issues saving files. Just search the forum for that.

How about "Save in background"?

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