If the dialog doesn't appear, you can manually check the default recovery folders:
Because .ai files are valid PDFs, simply renaming corrupted.ai to corrupted.pdf may allow a PDF repair tool (e.g., qpdf , pdftk , or Adobe Acrobat) to recover vector content.
| Section | Description | |----------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------| | File Header | Magic number: %!PS-Adobe-3.0 or %PDF-1.x depending on save options | | PDF Body | Cross-reference tables, objects, streams | | Illustrator Private Data | Encapsulated within an Illustrator dictionary in the PDF catalog | | Preview Image | Optional, for thumbnail display |