Recovering Crashed PSD file

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
March 20, 2012
4 replies
60731 views

My .psd (cs5) file crashed. Is there anyway to recover it.

Anyone who has done it successfully here ?

This topic has been closed for replies.

T

Talkin Rock

Participant

Here's a good trick that's works in many cases. You'll be using Fireworks to open, and re-save the Photoshop file. This will fix most corruptions.

Open the corrupt Photoshop file in Fireworks.
Use Fireworks to save it as a .psd Photoshop file. (Important: Do Not save it as a Fireworks file or another extension, because Photoshop may not recognize the layers, or you could lose data.)
Remember to give your file a different name when saving, so you won't overwrite your original. (A good idea would be to create a backup of your original before trying this procedure.)
Open your newly created file in Photoshop.
Remember that many effects will not show in Fireworks, but should show up in the Photoshop layers.

Fireworks plays nicely with Photoshop, and generally preservers the most of the original layers/data. The older Fireworks versions are ok at this technique, but the newer CS versions are really good at preserving/transferring information. This works well when Photoshop and Fireworks are the same version/suite, to avoid the diffrent version (too old/new) conflict. If your file is badly corrupted, you may be able to get some of your data back using this technique. This may work with other Adobe software too?

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Another long-shot technique in Windows is to see if there's a Shadow Copy of your file (copy from a restore point). Right-click on the file, choose Properties from the list - in the Properties box, choose the Previous Versions tab. Hopefully (in theory…) there'll be a useable previous version to choose from. These instructions are for Vista. If the tab is not there, do a search for instructions for this feature on your operating system.

Noel Carboni

Legend

There's usually very little chance of recovering a corrupted PSD file, and Photoshop doesn't go out of its way to make any backup copies for you (something they really need to fix, IMO).

Do you regularly back up your system (for example to an external hard drive)? If so, is it possible your file has been backed up?

What operating system are you running?

-Noel

G

graphiasAuthor

Known Participant

Noel,

Fortunately I was not the one who suffered this. This happened to a friend of mine.

He does take a backup regularly of any file he's working on, but he didn't take it for this one. He resolved the issue by reworking on it.

OS: Windows XP

Adobe definitely should fix this issue.

Noel Carboni

Legend

Adobe really should make use of the Recycle Bin on a Windows system. If you feel strongly about this, perhaps starting a thread over on the feature request forum could help Adobe know it's desirable:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family

I did that:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop_please_make_photoshop_use_the_recycle_bin_when_saving_files

Beyond that...

Loss of data, because of user error, application bug, or hardware fault, is always a possibility.

I strongly recommend anyone reading this and who is not currently following a process for regularly backing up their data implement a backup strategy ASAP.

External hard drives with multi-terabyte capacity are dirt cheap. It might take a few moments to set up, but with the modern OSs it's actually possible to set it and forget it, and think how glad you'll be when (not if) you lose data and have a way to recover it!

-Noel

Mylenium

Legend

As Mr. Pfaffenbichler said, you need to provide more info. It may be possible to recover some of the file (but not all), but it will depend on the specific circumstances of the crash and how much of the data was actually already saved.

Mylenium