All my layers and artwork is gone, but stuff shows up in the preview- how do I get everything back?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
April 12, 2021
1 reply
621 views

I have a large working file for multiple projects, that all have the same look at feel and use the same assets. I have multiple artboards for each project and mulitple layers. When you open Illustrator and it shows you recently opened files, you see artwork in the preview, but when I open the file, I have all fo the artboards but zero artwork- no vectors, no placed images- nothing. And nothing shows up in preview mode.

Not to mention my 20 some layers are gone and it's only showing one. So even if I had accidentally deleted all of my work (with out noticing?) I should still have layers. Not to mention tha I lock my layers when I'm not working on them so that DOESN'T happen.

Any suggestions? Please?

Thank you!

This topic has been closed for replies.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

The preview does not necessarily represent the content of the file, since (on Windows) it's an embedded raster file.

Please tell us:

your system and version.

exactly what happened with your files, was there a crashwhen youlast worked on them, what is the history?

where do you save files?

Do you have backups?

S

ShieldsCommaCJAuthor

Participant

Well, the good news is I did find a back up on the cloud server. whew. and I've saved a copy back to my drive as a duplicate because I'd still like to know what's up with this file so that it doesn't happen again.

So here's what i have going on:

It's version 25.2.1, running on a Mac. It's updated reguarly through the Creative Cloud desktop app.

Not really sure what happened. I was using the working file, which has bits and peices laying around, along with the finished peice. Each piece has it's own artboard. Some of the assest, like lettering or die lines are vector. The textures are embedded artwork from Photoshop.

Once a piece is done, it gets copied and pasted into a new document, lettering outlined and artwork embedded. So even if I hadn't found my working file, I'd still have the finals and still have the linked photoshop files.

That's it. I don't remember there being a crash or anything. I remember finishing the jobs, releasing the specs and not giving it anouther thought until today when I went to start working on packaging.

Now i did get a system update one night, so perhaps it forced closed Illustrator, but I'm typically pretty good at saving at the end of the day.... but not impossible to forget.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

So you don't shut down the computer in the evening?

Doyousave files on a local disk? On a network? Synchronized folder?

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