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T
Tzu-hsin
Participant
July 1, 2025
Question

Illustrator often fails to autosave, or doesn't autosave in the right intervals

  • July 1, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 333 views

I can't recount how many times illustrator has lost my files/progresses.

I've set the "Automatically save recovery data" to every 2 minutes, and yet it never does,

it varies from 10 minutes to an hour or longer, or sometimes simply never saves anything, it gets particularly worse with files that haven't been manually saved.

I just lost another 30 minutes of progress again because of it, and it's absolutely ridiculous.
I even tried going in to the recovery file folder to check if it saves my files, and it's like I described above, it's never consistent.

why has this never been fixed?

2 replies

Anubhav M
Community Manager
Anubhav MCommunity Manager
Community Manager
July 1, 2025

Hello @Tzu-hsin,

I'm sorry to hear about your experience. Our team has made some improvements to file saving, which should also help with recovering files after a crash in the latest Illustrator (beta) release. Please try out the latest Illustrator (beta) (https://adobe.ly/4l8RUm7) and share your feedback.

Anubhav

    T
    Tzu-hsinAuthor
    Participant
    July 1, 2025

    thank you for the response and the good news about the long awaited improvement.

    Monika Gause
    Community Expert
    Monika GauseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 1, 2025

    Recovery is not Autosave and should not be used as such.

     

    You are responsible for saving your file. You should never work for 1 hour or even 30 minutes without saving your file. ANd then also make backups. On different harddisks.

    T
    Tzu-hsinAuthor
    Participant
    July 1, 2025

    ?? I'm literally talking about recovery files, and it clearly states "automatically save" for recovery files, which is this post is about. I'm NOT talking about the regular save files, of course I manually save them periodically. If recovery files shouldn't work the way intended, why even have that feature there with these settings available? it states autosave for recovery file every 2 minutes, then it should auto save recovery files every 2 minutes. period.

    Monika Gause
    Community Expert
    Monika GauseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 1, 2025

    Recovery files are not something you should rely on as a replacement for a backup. It looks like you have to regularly open it. 

    Crashes are a critical moment. If Illustrator crashes while it is saving your recovery file, then the file will almost certainly be lost.

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