Work Not Appearing When Opening (1/19/2018)

[kevint5276510]

Hey there,

      I ran into a problem where I saved my project last night, and I went to open it this morning and all of my layers were not appearing except for the under and spoiler layer (see below). The 'eye' is on for every layer and I saved an .ai file and a .pdf, and the thumbnail for both files (in File Explorer and in the Illustrator menu) shows the full work as it was when I saved last night, but when I open either one all the layers disapper except for the two.

      All of my artwork is still there in both the ai. and .pdf files, all of the artwork is 'visible' for both files, but neiter one shows the full artwork when opening.

*I also had the layer clipping 'locked' at the time of saving last night. If that helps with your conclusion.

     Here is the layers panel when I opened the file this morning.

     And here is what show up for both the ai. and .pdf file previews.

     Please let me know if there is someway to fix it, salvage or transfer the artwork. Or anyway that doesn't involve me starting over.

     Thank you.

[Monika Gause]

Which version and which system?

Any error messages when opening the file`

Is this the first time that this happens?

When did you last restart the computer?

[kevint5276510]

The version is 22.0.1 and it runs on Windows 10.

No error message came up before or after opening the file.

This is the first time I have ever encountered this problem.

I last restarted the computer after I tried to fix the problem myself.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

Do you perhaps save your files on a network or into a shared folder?

What happens in the preview is that your system uses specific preview data, not the actual AI content of the file. So the preview might still be working while your AI data is corrupt.

An AI file might also contain PDF data and that is often intact. So what you might try is the following: create a new AI file and place the problem file in it. Thus you open the PDF content of the file (if there is any)

About Illustrator files:

How Illustrator saves files - YouTube

[kevint5276510]

The YouTube tutorial perfectly explained how to fix the problem.

Thank you so much for your help!

[Monika Gause]

You're welcome.

Accessing the PDF part of the file is only a workaround. It sometimes helps that you don't have to build everything from scratch, but a couple of things might also get lost. Such as effects or layers.

So you should try and find out why it happened in order to prevent it from happening again. Saving directly to a network or saving to synched folders might be a cause for this.