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minhunter
minhunter
Participant
Jun 25, 2016 4:57 AM UTC
Question

Acrobat crashed and I lost all highlights and comments. Even of saved files. How do I recover them?

I've looked through the forum's here and seen quite a number of similar experiences, although mostly from 3-4 years ago. Is there really no way to recover the highlights and comments? This is hours of work. Is acrobat really that unstable?

    8 replies

    Adobe Employee
    arvindy
    Adobe Employee
    Jun 17, 2025 6:14 AM UTC

    Hi minhunter,

    Thank you for reporting the issue and apologies for the inconvenience caused. Under normal circumstances, Acrobat does not lose your highlights and comments once you have saved the file after making those changes. It is possible that Acrobat crashed before you saved your most recent annotations, which would result in the loss of those unsaved edits.

    When such a crash occurs, Acrobat typically detects the abnormal shutdown and displays a recovery dialog upon reopening the application (please see the attached snapshot titled ‘recovery_dialog’). This dialog allows you to recover any unsaved changes from the previous session. If you did not see this recovery prompt, or if the changes were not saved before the crash, unfortunately, those edits cannot be restored.

    To help mitigate the risk of losing changes in the future, we recommend reducing the auto-save interval to 1 minute in the Document Preferences. Please refer to the attached snapshot ‘auto_save.png’ for guidance on how to do this.

    Most importantly, Acrobat should not crash in the first place. If you experience another crash, we kindly request that you provide the crash dump (.dmp) file. This will enable our team to investigate the issue more thoroughly.

    For instructions on how to collect and share the crash dump file, please refer to the ‘Using Windows error reporting to collect Acrobat/Reader crash dumps’ section.

    Thank you for your cooperation.

    1. recovery_dialog

     

    2. auto_save

     

    Regards,

    Arvind

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    TeddyBella
    Participant
    Jul 10, 2025 4:31 PM UTC

    After crashing, Acrobat said it had failed to recover my pdf file.

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    JR Boulay
    Community Expert
    JR BoulayCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    Jun 9, 2025 9:32 PM UTC

    [MOVED TO THE ACROBAT DISCUSSIONS]

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    Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe
    YatharthS
    Participating Frequently
    Jun 27, 2016 12:18 AM UTC

    Hi mavanui ,

    If the changes made were not saved in the saved in document before application crashed,there is no possible way to restore them.

    Would like to inform that you need to make all the changes again within the document.

    Regards,

    Yatharth

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    minhunter
    minhunterAuthor
    Participant
    Jun 27, 2016 1:32 AM UTC

    Hi Yatharth,

    Thanks for taking the time to reply. As mentioned in my initial comment, the issue is that the files had in fact been saved as I was working on them. Acrobat crashed and my saved highlights and comments were no longer there. It seems Acrobat is not a very stable platform for this type of work. I've noticed this is an issue going back many years for quite a few Acrobat users. It would be great if Acrobat worked on a backup solution so that when it crashes, crucial work can be retrieved.

    M

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    YatharthS
    Participating Frequently
    Jun 28, 2016 7:23 PM UTC

    Hi mavanui ,

    You may fill the Feature Request form for this feature :- Feature Request/Bug Report Form

    Regards,

    Yatharth

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