Recover lost annotation on Preview

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Level 1

17 points

Recover lost annotation on Preview

In the last 2 years Preview has become more and more unreliable. I lost hours of work annotating PDF files, to discover that Preview did not save my notes after quitting. Other times it crashed and deleted all the notes despite having saved the file multiple times during the work.

This behaviour has not changed over the last two MacOS updates, so it looks like Apple is not paying much attention to these known bugs. It has required me to move to third party applications for reliability.

Is anybody else experiencing these issues and knows how to recover lost annotations?

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Dec 14, 2020 11:09 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,254 points

Dec 14, 2020 11:23 AM in response to maurizioplll

There is no recovery of lost annotations, unless a Time Machine backup caught the PDF with some of those applied annotations. Once Preview crashes, you should press the shift key while relaunching Preview — to avoid it attempting to reload its last saved application state.

In my own experience over the last several operating system upgrades, including Big Sur 11.0.1, and provided the PDF in question has no PDF or user permission restrictions on it against changes, and the PDF is actually compatible with Preview, then Preview will simply autosave annotations as they are applied to the PDF. This is not theory, but something I have observed by watching the PDF file icon change to reflect the updated annotations from the autosave. I have never lost an annotation using Preview.

A PDF that does have these change restrictions on it will require that it is saved as another PDF document name to preserve those (annotation) changes.

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Recover lost annotation on Preview

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