Every time the software fails, what hurts us the most is that we must find a way to recover the records after a blocking either unexpected shutdownalthough in Illustrator it is somewhat easy to achieve.
Just like any other software, from time to time Illustrator can crash in various ways and without warning. That is why we always recommend saving all the files we are working on from time to time. The best way to do this, and not go crazy in the process, is to press Ctrl + S or G depending on your hotkey settings.
Recover Illustrator files after crash or unexpected shutdown
In many occasions, when a program like Illustrator crashes, the program will close unexpectedly or it will freeze and we will have to force close the application through the window or Task Manager. We also find that it crashes because perhaps the hardware requirements are not met.
RAM memory can be compromised thanks to other programs that we have open. It can also fail because the computer is overheating due to poor ventilation. Actually, the reasons can be several, but the methods to solve it are few and we will see them below.
Restart Illustrator
And yes, it is the simplest and what generally works. When Illustrator has these kinds of errors, the first thing we are going to have to do, whether we like it or not, is to restart it. The main thing here would be to force the complete shutdown of the program.
We press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to open the Task Manager. Here we will have to look for the name of the program among the list of running applications. We proceed to right click on it and choose End task.
When we finish doing it, we will have to start the program again, the documents that were closed unexpectedly, would have to be recovered automatically. We recommend saving them, as soon as we open the program just in case.
Find the recovery folder in Illustrator
It is also possible that we would have closed the software without saving the recovery files, although we can still find these files. These are saved in an autosave folder. Depending on the version, it can be found in one or another location.
Press Start and type %AppData%, press Enter. Next, we are going to have to navigate to the following location:
- RoamingAdobeAdobe Illustrator [versión]
- Settingsen_USx64DataRecovery
In case you have customized the location where the files will be saved automatically. We’ll need to check the location we specified in Illustrator settings.
Set up Illustrator auto save to recover files
The options for automatic saving of Illustrator will vary depending on the version of the software that we have on our computer. However, we always find this feature enabled by default. It is more than evident that we recommend keeping it activated at all times.
In order to enable or disable automatic saving, we will have to go to the menu bar at the top and click on Edit, then go to Preferences, go to General or we can press Ctrl + K
We are going to have to go to the file and clipboard handling tab.
Now we are going to go to Automatically save recovery information every and we will choose how often it will do it. By default, the software will save files every 10 minutes, although we can change it to the period of time that suits us best.
We do not recommend that automatic saving be done every so often, it can become annoying to work smoothly. Especially if we are with a large project that requires a lot of resources. In case the configured time is too long, we would find that the file is not automatically saved in time if the program fails.
