But before you slam your fist on the desk, take a breath. Adobe Illustrator has robust, albeit sometimes hidden, recovery features. Here is your tactical guide to recovering a lost or corrupted .ai file. Illustrator behaves a lot like Photoshop and InDesign: when it crashes unexpectedly, it usually attempts to save a temporary recovery file before it dies.
Instead of opening the file, create a new blank document. Go to File > Place and select your corrupted .ai file. Uncheck "Link" and click "Place." Illustrator will often render a corrupted file as a single, flattened object. You can't edit the layers, but you can copy the artwork into a fresh document. recover adobe illustrator file
There are few sounds more chilling to a designer than the sudden whirr-stop of a laptop fan, followed by a frozen cursor. Whether it’s a power outage, an unexpected system crash, or the dreaded "Illustrator has stopped responding" dialog box, losing hours of vector work is a nightmare. But before you slam your fist on the desk, take a breath