Designers or artists may spend several hours even days in Adobe Illustrator to create a project. So, whenever an AI file left unsaved after crash or lost/damaged for unknown reasons, it would cause significant disruptions for your work. This is totally a disaster!
Enabling AutoSave in Adobe Illustrator may not unfortunately restore your AI file, here is more about illustrator files recovery, restoring crashed, deleted even corrupted AI files on both Mac and Windows, in latest Illustrator, even earlier CC, CS6, CS5 versions.
Best Data Recovery for Mac and Windows
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Free DownloadAn unsaved AI file may be caused by system crash or irresponsive AI program. Whenever we left an Adobe Illustrator unsaved, we should never give up restoring them. There are 5 ways to recover an unsaved AI file, no matter your AI files are created in latest Illustrator, in CC, CS6 or earlier versions. And we should always start from its AutoSave location.
We create and edit files everyday in different file processors, those files cost us time & effort and they are valuable to us. Most of the file processor developers know this too and this is the reason why there is always an AutoSave or AutoRecover feature added to those programs, Adobe Illustrator is not an exception. We can utilize AI AutoSave feature to recover an unsaved AI file.
By default, the AutoSave feature is enabled, you can go to Edit>Preferences>General>File Handling &Clipboard, check if the check box before “Automatically Save Recovery Date Every:” is selected. If yes, we can use the AutoSave function now, if not, select it for next possible AI file lose.
For Windows Users:
C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [version] Settings\en_US\x64\DataRecovery
For Mac Users:
< your username>/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator [version] Settings/en_US/Adobe Illustrator Prefs
Actually, if you have enabled AutoSave in Illustrator, when the program quit unexpectedly, the next time you restart the app, it will restore the ai file automatically for you.
When we are creating or processing a file, a temporary file will be generated to store data before a task is completed, it works a backup in case that a file is left unsaved. To recover unsaved AI files, we can also check our temporary folder, the recovery rate is low, but we don’t have another option.
If you have logged in Adobe Creative Cloud, this service will store all the versions of your Adobe Illustrator files. In the case that Illustrator has crashed and your file was not saved, you can go to your cloud assets and restore the unsaved AI files from a latest version.
If you fail to recover unsaved AI files with above 2 methods, stop launching and writing to your Adobe Illustrator program, get help from Adobe Illustrator staff right now.
You can either ask for help in the Adobe Community or just contact Adobe support, this may take time, but there are many cases that successfully solved by contacting Adobe support.
But what if you accidentally deleted or lost AI files on Mac or Windows? That would be quite easier to recover as long as you find a professional data recovery program.
Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac and Windows is recommended to recover your deleted or lost AI files on Mac and Windows. It supports recovering 1000+ types of files, including photos (vector graphics, common images, etc.), videos, audios, documents, archives and so on, regardless that the files are saved on internal or external hard dive or other storage devices. Users are allowed to preview found files before recovery. The data recovery process is extremely easy and fast, you don’t have to know much more about data recovery, Cisdem basically does all the jobs.
Main Features of Cisdem Data Recovery
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Here comes to another situation, we got a corrupted illustrator file and could not open it at all. Damaged AI files can be caused by different reasons: device crash, improper editing/converting/formatting, partition error, virus attach, etc. And it is never easy to repair an illustrator file.
In the past, we had to pay dearly to a data recovery service, but today, as the remote work and use of cloud services increase, more and more companies or individual developers are providing online tools, including those ones that repair corrupted illustrator files. Here for users in demand, we’ve picked the best---illustrator.repair, it is for online use, but not for free, exclusively designed to repair illustrator files, you have to pay to get the repaired ai files.
Attention: The files will be stored on the server for 10 days.
It is not 100% for sure that an unsaved or lost AI file can be restored, to avoid any loss, there are multiple tips to prevent your AI files from being unsaved or lost.
An unsaved AI file is mainly caused by program crash or no response, we should always prepare Adobe Illustrator for coming works.
An AI file may be deleted by mistake. We should be very careful when perform a file deletion.
No one want their files ended with unsaved or deleted, but it cannot be avoided. Whenever we run into an AI file loss, we should never give up and turn our backs on those unsaved or deleted AI files. Have a try on our recommended solutions as above, it may help. And we should notice that, recovering unsaved AI files is totally different thing from recovering deleted/lost AI files, to restore deleted or lost AI files, we have to use a data recovery tool.
Connie has been writing for Mac productivity and utility apps since 2009. Each review and solution is based on her practical tests, she is aways energetic and trustworthy in this field.
