Recovering the unsaved changes on Adobe Reader XI file

[Tekilay]

Hi There,

I have been working on one Adobe Reader XI file and I had some annotations on it but iunfortunately i closed the file without saving it. Is there any way to regain those changes?

[try67]

Look under Edit - Preferences - Documents. Do you have the option to auto-save the document to a temporary file every X minutes? If so, there *might* be a saved copy of it stored somewhere in the temp folders of Reader, but the chances are low.

[Tekilay]

Hi Gilad,

Thanks for your response

I have just checked and i have this option was turned of for every five minutes. Then I went to the "C:\Users\D057078\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Acrobat\11.0\Security" folder and i saw two dat files exactly have the same date that i closed my file without saving. But i am not sure if those are the ones that I look for. If yes I do not know how to open dat file. Would you be able to help in these further steps?

Thanks,

Gamze.

[try67]

Not 100% sure about this, but I think the temporary files will be located

in this folder:

C:/Users/<USERNAME>/AppData/Local/Temp/Adobe/Reader/11.0

If you see files there which are not PDF you can try to rename them as .pdf

files and then open them in Reader.

[Tekilay]

Hi Gilad,

Thanks you so much. As you suggested I checked the Local/ temp but there is no file availbale there. In the roaming/adobe/acrobat/security i changed the dat extesions to pdf and tried to open but reader was not able to open them

Thanks again for your support.

Best regards,

Gamze.

[try67]

I advise against editing files in the Security folder. I don't know why you

think those are the temporary files... You can cause all kinds of problems

in the application by changing those .dat files, so you should avoid doing

it.

[Luke32395538r1nz]

In addition to try67's advice on locating the autosave folder, I would point out that if you close Adobe after the autorecover process fails to recover the file that previous changes were stored in (the autosave files are named very simply, 1.tmp, 2.tmp, etc), that autosaved file is DELETED when you next close Adobe. This is also true when you mouse-slip and close Adobe without saving a file, and click ‘no’ instead of ‘yes’ when it asks you to save files. So it's best to have another option for getting to those files.

Inoculate yourself against future agony by setting up a backup profile (e.g., OneDrive or SyncBack) for the autosave folder that scans the Adobe autosave folder at the same frequency as you have set Adobe to autosave documents (edit/preferences/documents tab/save settings.) Call it, e.g., Adobe backup. In the event of a future crash where the files are not recovered, or if you close Adobe without saving files, then: 

1. make sure Adobe is closed.
2. Go to the Autosave folder and copy the .tmp files you saved in Adobe backup back in to it.
3. open Adobe; it should prompt you to recover unsaved documents.