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Participant
April 24, 2025
Question

Corrupt AI Files, need suggestions

  • April 24, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 145 views

Hello, 

So we had a catastrophic failure on a file server that resutled in a lot of files being recovered. While we have some files that we know are lost, we are running into a reoccuring problem with illustrator files matching the file size of a previous backup but being 'corrupt'. This leads me to suspect that if there is corruption on these files, it's not by much. 

Is there any ways in which the community has found to deal with this issue? Obviously data recovery is tricky and there may still very well be data lost. But the disproportionately large amount of corrupt illustrator files leads me to believe there's something I'm missing. I've tried just importing these files with no success.

1 reply

Monika Gause
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 24, 2025

Do the files still open in Acrobat?

If so, you can create a new Illustrator file and then place them into it. Won't be fully editable though.

 

Illustrator files if you save them PDF compatible consist of two parts: an AI file and a PDF file embedded into it. Recovering a hard disk will most of the time destroy the AI parts, but possible the PDF part is still readable.