How to Recover Work on Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a graphics platform that allows for vector design, 3-D rendering and perspective drawing. Recovering work in Illustrator allows you to retrieve an unusable file for editing and repair. Illustrator doesn’t have recovery mode enabled upon installation, but once you have activated this option, you can navigate to the folder in which you stored your work and recover the file there.

Setting Up Recovery

  1. 1.

    Close Adobe Illustrator if it is running. Access the "C:" drive on your computer and locate the “Adobe Preferences” file. On a Windows 7 computer, click “Start,” then “Computer.” Click the icon representing your hard drive and place the cursor in the “Search Computer” field.

  2. 2.

    Type the following into the search field if you are using Windows 7:

    C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [your version of Adobe Illustrator] Settings\en_US\AIPrefs

    Alternately, if you are using a Mac, type:

    < your username>/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator [your version of Adobe Illustrator] Settings/en_US/Adobe Illustrator Prefs

  3. 3.

    Click the magnifying glass icon or “Search.” Open the Preferences file in a plain text editor such as Notepad for Windows or Text Wrangler for a Mac.

  4. 4.

    Locate the following section of text in the Preferences file that is now open in your text editor:

    /aiFileFormat {/PDFCompatibility 1enableATEReadRecovery 0 /enableContentRecovery 0/enableATEWriteRecovery 0/clipboardPSLevel 3}

  5. 5.

    Change the “enableContentRecovery” value from “0” to “1”. If you do not find an “enableContentRecovery” configuration entry in the “/aiFileFormat” section, add “/enableContentRecovery 1”.

  6. 6.

    Save the file without changing the name or adding an extension to the filename.

Work Recovery

  1. 1.

    Launch Adobe Illustrator. Click “File” and select "Open” from the context menu.

  2. 2.

    Choose the file you want to recover in the file-navigation dialog. Highlight the file but do not open it.

  3. 3.

    Press “Ctrl-Alt-Shift” on a Windows PC, or press the Command-Option-Shift” keys simultaneously on a Mac.

  4. 4.

    Click “Open” while holding down the keys. A blank window will open. Close this window.

  5. 5.

    Navigate to the directory containing your file with the work you want to recover. Open it and look for a copy of the original filename preceded by an underscore (“_”) character. This is your recovered file ready for editing.