Saving a corrupted Illustrator file!

Late yesterday I had a freak out moment. I was working on a file and was exporting it and the colors were off. Usually this means that my color space is not what I am expecting. Sure enough, exporting to a jpg the color space should be RGB, and it was set to CMYK. I changed the space in the “color” palette,saved the file and thought nothing of it.

I went to open it back up later and got this wonderful message; “Can’t open the illustration. Could not complete the requested operation.” I didn’t worry too much, sometimes I’ll get a similar message when my system’s memory has been maxed, and programs just start shutting down or working funny. But after I even rebooted I was still getting the same message and starting to freak that I had lost my work.

If you look anywhere online, designers suggest you to save stages. I hadn’t ever adopted this practice because of resources (space) and time (managing all the different versions). So, I didn’t have an earlier revision, so what do I do? I can open the file as raster just fine in Photoshop, and I can see the file in preview in Illustrator.

What I ended up figured out was, because I could see the file and open it other places, that the corruption wasn’t too bad. I may be able to save the file, it may have just been a linked file that had caused a problem.

So, I opened the Illustrator file in Adobe Acrobat, and saved it back out as an .eps. I opened it in Illustrator and I had my artwork back! Pretty psyched about that, and hopefully I learned a lesson to save some multiple copies or stage revisions.

If you have a corrupt Illustrator file giving you the “Can’t open the illustration” message, try that and I hope it works for you.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• How do I save my action files? How do I bring / import my actions into a newer version of Photoshop?
• Got the “Numerals” version of the Pengo Control Panel Overlay
• Pengo Sideart Color Separations
• Amazing Arcade Themed Illustration
• Editing layered Fireworks pngs in Photoshop

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