This file has been modified outside of Illustrator.

Started getting this message with any file that is saved on Google Drive. Very frustrating. MacOS Big Sur, latest versions of Illustrator

I am getting the same issue/message as well as having files I do in illustrator that I reopen telling me that the file has to be "recovered" which gets me a version of the file that is more like a pdf being opened in illustrator. You can work with it but the text is not connected and some of it is in outline - very frustrating. It happens with files that have been "modified outside of illustrator" more often. I have messaged Adobe but so far nothing. I beginning to wonder if Adobe is pushing its software

developers so hard to create newer and newer versions of its programs that it is neglecting to correct existing issues.

This thread has been created in 2008. Here we are in 2021, 13 years later, and I am still seeing this error. I suspect this has to do with how Adobe software or creative cloud is saving and syncing your files. As soon as you make a save to your creative cloud folder, creative cloud (or photoshop, or illustrator) immediately tries to syncronize (or cache) the file whether or not the file is finished saving.* This can also be caused by software trying to constantantly trying to cache too frequently. Adobe has a bad history of not managing its cache very well. (There can be a life application here as well). 🙂 This leads to user's precious disk space needlessly being consumed. 

*To all software engineers: do you see this as a problem? Should we let the file finish saving, or coping, before syncronizing and caching?

I hate to throw a wrench in but this in NOT an Apple OS issue as I get the same error message with Windows 10 (Illustrator CC 2018). Happens a lot and even have had files that were saved and closed when re-opened be missing the latest edits.

Still encountering the issue in OS High Sierra, despite Adobe releasing updates to CC 2018 last week...

We have a fix and is available in the pre-release build. Please visit https://adobe.ly/1o2SDsg and get the latest build for version 22.1.

While the build is prerelease this build is of production quality. Please feel free to use/recommend it for your day to day activity.

Warm Regards,

Ashutosh Chaturvedi | Sr. Quality Engineering Manager – Illustrator

Make It an Experience.

Adobe, do you read this. Can you please fix this issue for us all? Thanks guys.

This message appears for me when I save a file which has a linked file in it, such as a document in inDesign that has a linked AI file or an AI document that has a photoshop file linked.

I noticed that this happens when the linked file is in another drive or in a folder that seems to get its permission from another app.

So for example, I got this error today working on an InDesign document that has an illustrator file linked and the illustrator file was saved in another partition on my HD. The other case is when the Google Drive app is open, sometimes (not always) I get this message when I make changed to a file and save. Although in the same sessions before that it'd work normally without showing it. When I quit the google drive app the document saves normally with no problem.

So I think when the google drive is open it restricts changes to its folders. Same thing with the othr partition on my machine, although its the same Harddisk but I guess illustrator doesn't get a permission or it seems to read the file again as if it was opened fresh.

It seems like when the drive isn't constantly in use and it writes to it only when saving, so the connection to that drive or partition is lost and needs to re-established and the document will be overriden but the new saved one.

I've just started getting the same notification today. I am only working with one file in Illustrator and the only adjustments outside the software have been importing client-supplied .ai and .eps logos into my artwork, with the exception of one file which was a .pdf, which I extracted the logo from. I am working off our server, as I always have, not Dropbox or other storage systems.

I updated to High Sierra two weeks ago and am running CC 2018. The software is sluggish and takes ages to open and I've been having constant permissions issues with Photoshop and Illustrator ever since. Every other app (inc. Microsoft 365 products) is working fine. I'm not surprised that Adobe haven't got their act together yet - I called support because of the permissions issues last week and after half an hour of screen-sharing with them and installing/re-installing software, they told me it was an Apple issue and I needed to sort with them. They refused to put me through to a technical advisor. After speaking with them I spent an hour researching on the 'net and managed to find a solution, which was all to do with dumping Adobe prefs and reinstalling in a particular sequence.