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Basically the title.
I tried opening the .aid file and it never finished opening. Before I opened it I saved it to my dropbox so there was a back up. It asked me to replace a file, and I hit ignore then the file never opened. So I opened the dropbox saved copy, and same thing; hit ignore on the linked file prompt and so it never opened. Dumb mistake. I tried pasting the file one more time and it disappeared from the copy queue. My dropbox sync history says it's deleted, but it's missing from my deleted files on there as well. If there is a way to find it please let me know.
The Recovery file's subfolder still exists in the data recovery folder if that means anything.
AID files are not meant to be opened via the default open process at all.
The way this works is that they are saved and then when Illustrator crashes and you reopen it, it will search for AID files. It will present you a dialog asking if you want to try and rebuild the file. You need to click on OK at that particular moment or the AID will be deleted automatically.
The rebuild might fail for whatever reason. One of the main reasons being that Illustrator crashed exactly in the moment when it was
...You're welcome.
Let's hope this never happens again to you. But just in case all you have left is the AID, then do contact the engineers immediately. You can do so by posting on this forum or by using the address mentioned in this helpx article: https://helpx.adobe.com/in/illustrator/kb/troubleshoot-file-issues.html
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[Moderator moved from Using the Community forums to Illustrator.]
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The obvious solution is to sit back and come up with a backup strategy. Now.
Save early, save often, save different versions. Make backups. And even more backups.
An additional harddisk is always cheaper than having to redo 2 hours of work.
Won't help you with that lost file though.
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Wow! "Save often". Why didn't I think of that? In all of these forums, how did it take me that long to find that answer? /s/
My Question is what happened to the file. Your comment is frivolous and unhelpful and not constructive. If you have any ideas as to what these files exactly do upon opening, I would love to discuss! The amount of work I lost was easliy recouped, because, guess what, I do save often and I always do the back-up thing. This was the first time that it didn't finish it's opening sequence and I'm curious as to why. Was is my ignoring of the linked file prompt that cause a glitch? That's the only thing I could think of.
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AID files are not meant to be opened via the default open process at all.
The way this works is that they are saved and then when Illustrator crashes and you reopen it, it will search for AID files. It will present you a dialog asking if you want to try and rebuild the file. You need to click on OK at that particular moment or the AID will be deleted automatically.
The rebuild might fail for whatever reason. One of the main reasons being that Illustrator crashed exactly in the moment when it was writing the AID file. Crash while saving is a 97% guarantee for losing the file.
The Illustrator engineers are sometimes able to recover files. And just in case you have an AID file, they have the means to start a recovery on that. But there is no guarantee for this to work.
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Thank you!!! This is extremely helpful and informative. So in layman’s terms, they're truly temporary files that open once then are coded to automatically delete and they're also very finicky.
So that explains why it deleted from my copy and probably why dropbox can't recover it. That's absolutely facinating!!
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You're welcome.
Let's hope this never happens again to you. But just in case all you have left is the AID, then do contact the engineers immediately. You can do so by posting on this forum or by using the address mentioned in this helpx article: https://helpx.adobe.com/in/illustrator/kb/troubleshoot-file-issues.html