Work progress inexplicably lost / disappeared

[bmaltz730]

Hi all -- Help/ideas needed! 

I use Illustrator all the time for graphic design projects. I have auto-save turned on, and I've never lost any work... until now. Twice over the past two weeks, the following has happened (with the same project I'm working on): 

• I spent time making edits
• When I finished working, I made sure the project auto-saved, and then I closed Illustrator
• When I reopened the project the next time, I found that my edits had not in fact saved
• First, I thought that maybe Illustrator had crashed and that's why they didn't save. Yet, there was no "recovered" file to choose from, and I didn't receive any alert.
• Then, I looked to revert the file to the previous saved version, hoping my edits would be logged there. But, according to my Mac and Illustrator itself, I had never even opened the document during the day I made the edits, so there is no version to revert to. 

What's going on? How do I fix it/can I get my edits back? (Yes, Illustrator and my Mac are fully up to date software wise). 

[kglad]

frequently save with increasing version numbers appended to your file name.  never rely on autosaves.

periodically close and reopen the last version.  if that has no problem you can delete previous versions.

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from cc desktop bugs">

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't really like trusting auto-save functions very much (or saving my only copy of the artwork to the cloud either). Astute Graphics' Auto Savior plugin has some pretty cool features in it, including a timer that can remind you to manually save your work at specific time intervals. That plugin can be had for free by doing a trial run of Astute Graphics' other premium plugins.

[Pariah Burke]

I've seen this happen multiple times with files/folders that are synchronized to Dropbox. Are your files being synched or backed up to a cloud storage service? Sometimes the cloud storage client fails or loses connection, and when it re-connects, it downloads to your computer the last version it has in the cloud, replacing the newer one.