Adobe must fix the .ai auto-save problem

[blick847]

Good afternoon,

I'm now searching this support forum for the fourth time wondering if there are any answers for the recovery problem. This has been happening since I started as a professional designer in 2023, and the fact that I see it still as a problem is insane to me. The answers I see most often as remedies aren't actually fixes in any way. .aishm files still don't open on Mac and I've seen reports that they don't work on Windows either. Many users have suggested downgrading to an older version so it saves as .aid instead is simply silly. This is a program that we pay $500/year or more to use, and not being able to use the features that we pay for are absolutely unacceptable. Many people chide users with this problem for "not saving enough," and even though it is best practice, again, they're telling us not to use a feature that WE PAY FOR because it doesn't work. It's 2025. Every other application has some sort of autosave feature, and I nearly guaruntee that power users would rather the company focus on stabilizing auto save than focusing on some AI feature like turntable that will never get used by 90% of professionals. AutoSaviour is $150 a year for the license to Astute. This is absolutely not in any way okay. We know you know that we know you're our only option, especiually for production and print.

[abuse removed by moderator]

[Anubhav M]

Hello @blick847,

I'm really sorry to hear about your experience. Unfortunately, recovery from .aishm files isn't currently possible. That said, the latest version of Illustrator includes improvements to the file-saving process, which should reduce the need for recovery in the future. However, issues may still occur in scenarios such as improper saves or file corruption. Our team is actively working to enhance both saving and recovery features in Illustrator, and I will share your feedback with the team.

Could you share a bit more about the context in which these files were saved or edited? For instance, were there any unexpected Illustrator crashes, sudden app closures, system shutdowns, or power outages during your work? Also, where were the files stored - locally, in a network/removable drive, or in the cloud?

To help prevent similar issues in the future, we recommend saving multiple versions of your active work locally or using cloud documents for added safety.

Anubhav

[blick847]

Hi Anybhav,
I want to preface this by saying it's important to me that it is well known on your team that 1) I'm not the only one having this problem and 2) it's completely unconscionable that a company as big as Adobe would break one of the most useful features and explain it away by saying "currently this file you're saving every few minutes does nothing." This is an issue that has popped up in the support forum many times only to be essentially ignored for years. 

I've been running on Mac since 2017, I'm currently on an M1 Pro MacBook Pro on Sequoia 15.6 with a now updated Illustrator 29.7.1 from I believe illustrator 29.3. In every instance, I've been editing a vector element (text, shapes, paths, etc) when Illustrator beach balls and crashes, which causes me to force quit. I save all my files locally, not on the cloud, for privacy reasons unless I'm collaborating. Every time this has happened, and it happened three times in August and many more at other times when I've been working on projects. Each time, Illustrator says that it has `filename`[Recovered] but when I open it back up, but instead it opens the most recent manually saved version and `filename`[Recovered] is nowhere to be found. This has been happening in every version of illustrator I've used since 2022, it's happened when editing vector shapes and embedded imagery. I also have my autosave set for every 2 minutes, which again saves .aishm files that don't do anything on mac. It's happened on various versions of macOS and others report it happening on Windows. I've lost tens of hours of work to this problem in 2025 alone

[Monika Gause]

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@blick847  schrieb:

AutoSaviour is $150 a year for the license to Astute.

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It's not. There is a free version. Like: completely free.

Also: I would first of all fix the crashing, because that is not normal.

And then I would just save my files. There is no auto save in Illustrator. What you are referring to is a recovery function. The problem with saving is: if a computer saves the exact moment when it crashes, the file is toast. And there is no exception to that, because it's not possible to protect the saving operation from the crash.

That is also the reason why just saving every few minutes is not sufficent. You need multiple versions, so that you have a fallback.

[blick847]

Took me a while to figure it out, but I was able to download Autosaviour. They hide the information about how to access it for free behind a dark pattern, which made it tough to learn that you can just download it from the plug-in manager.

The crashing has been an issue with Illustrator as long as I've been using it, across many devices, operating systems, OS versions and software versions. I keep a handful of projects that I'm working on at any given time open so I can switch between them or use assets from one project for another. Frankly, this is normal use, I hear from just about everyone else I know that uses illustrator that theirs crashes too. Basically all Adobe products are well-known across many verticals for being shockingly unstable. It's the reason why more and more video editors are moving towards Resolve and why Mac users have been using Final Cut Pro for 15 years instead of Premiere.

Last, the differnce between "auto-save" and "auto recover" is pendantic at best and it frankly shocks me that I keep seeing replies from you in these threads decrying saving when it's not only tone deaf but also doesn't actually solve the issue the people you're responding to are bringing up. The issue still is that Adobe changed the filetype for auto recovery to a format that is unreadable and that they have not fixed it since they made that change about two years ago. In essence, they took away a feature that I've been paying for since it debuted. No matter how many times you save, no matter what extensions you use or how many backups you make, the fact that they broke the feature and folks still have problems with recovery years later is completely unacceptable to the thousands, if not millions of students and professionals who rely on the application every day. If it were any other software, I would just recommend people cancel their subscription and go elsewhere, but like I said earlier, Adobe knows they have us in a vice grip. Illustrator isn't an industry standard, it's an industry requirement. The hours I've lost cost me much more than my subscription fee, so where's my compensation for destroying my work and wasting my time, Adobe?