Illustrator CC 2020 unable to save file - 'An unknown error has occurred'

[Sam Hood]

Me and my colleagues have experienced a problem recently where we are working on files and when we come to save them we are unable to.

The following message pops up in a dialog box, "An unknown error has occurred".

We have tried many different work arounds such as trying to save the file in a different format or drag the artwork to a new file and save it on our hardrives opposed to the network, but there is no way of saving the file at all. The only thing we can do is loose all of our work progress, sometimes costing us an hours worth of artworking/design, restart our iMac and try to recreate what we had done. This is really frustrating when you are working to tight deadlines! 
FYI - closing Illustrator and restating it doesn't fix the problem, only a full machine restart will get Illustrator working again.

[Sam Hood]

Having just experienced this problem again, Illustrator still wouldnt save the file after I restarted my iMac. I had to reset the PRAM on my iMac but holding (alt + cmd + R + P) when restarting my machine. Now that I have done this, Illustrator is behaving normally and I am able to save files, so I'm guessing this is a RAM problem? 

[Ashutosh_Mishra]

Hi Sam,

Glad to hear you were able to solve this issue.
Would you mind sharing the version of the OS & Illustrator? Have you tried resetting preferences of the app? If not, please try doing that if this happens again.

You may follow this help article to do that.

**Please note that resetting preferences will remove all the custom settings and Illustrator will launch with default settings. You can also take a backup of the folders in case you want to. Location is mentioned in the article.

Hope it helps.

Regards,

Ashutosh

[Sam Hood]

Hi Ashutosh,

Thanks for your reply. I haven't solved the issue because the bug can appear at anytime and stop us from saving our work progress, I've simply found a way of getting the program to work again until it happens the next time round. This bug has happened to myself and my colleagues many times since the latest update, causing us to loose our work progress and delay providing files to our clients.

Is resetting my preferances the only option you can offer? This will be very time consuming as we have our custom preferences setup for the type of files that we create. Are you sure that this will also fix the issue? 

Sam