Adobe Illustrator Not Responding – How to Recover Unsaved File?

Do not mistake the recovery function with Autosave. It's not meant to be Autosave and it doesn't work like autosave.

If it works, then it will only kick in after a crash. But if the crash happened while it was saving, your file is most likely toast. The only reliable measure is to save your files.

Save early.

Save often

Save multiple versions, because if your only file gets corrupted, then it will not work that you have saved every 5 minutes.

Save to your desktop.

If you are on a Mac, turn on Time Machine

Turn on File recovery and if it can give you back the last 20 minutes, then enjoy it.

Turn off "Background saving" in the Illustrator preferences, because it has the potential to ruin files while saving them.

By default, autosave (auto-recovery) is enabled for all Illustrator files. According to Recover Illustrator files after crash, check the following folder:

Windows

1. Type %AppData% in Windows Search.
2. Navigate to Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [version] Settings\en_US\x64\DataRecovery
3. Open the file with the .aid extension in Illustrator to recover the content.

macOS

1. Select Go in the menu bar and then select Go to Folder.
2. Type ~ /Library/ and press Return.
3. Navigate to Preferences/Adobe Illustrator [version] Settings/en_US/DataRecovery
4. Open the file with the .aid extension in Illustrator to recover the content.

Do you see any file?