Recovery . how to

It tells you to navigate to the preferences and set up the Recovery settings.

You are not supposed to navigate to the actual folders. The recovery works like this:

Illustrator regularly updates that recovery document. When a crash happens and you relaunch Illustrator, it will check whether there is something to recover. If it finds something that it can actually read, then it will offer you to recover it. At that point you *have* to click on "Recover". If you don't, the recovery file will be deleted.

The whole thing happens automatically. It's not meant for user interaction.

Also: if Illustrator crashes while saving the recovery file, the recovery file will likely be toast. If the file is too complex, Illustrator will likely not save it.

That is why you should not get yourself into a position where you rely on this recovery alone. It is cool for saving you 30 minutes of repeating work. But apart from that: make backups. And then make more backups. Save different versions of your files in different places.

Are you currently in a position where the only thing you have is that recovery file? In some rare cases the Illustrator engineers can help with that. But don't expect too much.