Initializing secure environment…
Initializing secure environment…
Five recovery strategies, tried in order of how much they preserve. Rebuild the cross-reference table, reconstruct a missing trailer, recover pages from a truncated file by scanning for page objects, salvage embedded images, and as a last resort render every page that can be found. The report tells you which strategy succeeded and what was lost, because a repair that silently drops half your document is worse than one that tells you. Nothing is uploaded, no sign-up, and it works offline.
To repair a damaged PDF free, add the file and it tries five recovery strategies in order — rebuilding the xref table, reconstructing the trailer, salvaging pages from a truncated file, extracting images, and finally rendering what survives. You are told which worked and what was lost. Nothing is uploaded.
The most common cause by a wide margin. The file structure is intact and the tail is missing. Recovery scans for page objects in the bytes that arrived and rebuilds from there — you get everything up to the cut, and the report tells you where the cut fell. Retry the download first if you can; recovery is the fallback, not the first move.
An HTML error page saved with a .pdf extension is the classic case, and it happens on every failed download behind a login. There is nothing to recover — the file contains no PDF at all. The tool says so rather than producing an empty document, which is the correct answer and saves you an hour.
When the page structure is beyond repair, the images are often intact inside the file. Extracting them gives you the content that matters — a scanned page, a chart, a photograph — even when the document as a document is gone. Combine with Extract Images to get every embedded asset at full quality.
Open it, count the pages, and compare against what you remember the document containing. If it is going into a legal, medical or financial record, re-obtain the original: a recovery is a convenience, and convenience is not a standard you want to meet for evidence.
Nine causes cover almost every case: a truncated download, a broken cross-reference table, a missing trailer, a bad startxref offset, an object that failed to decompress, a page tree that references pages which do not exist, a corrupted font stream, a file that is not a PDF at all but has a .pdf extension, and a zero-byte or partially written file from an interrupted save.
Often, partially. A truncated file has lost its tail, which usually contains the trailer and the later pages, but the earlier page objects are usually intact. The recovery scans for page objects in the surviving bytes and rebuilds a document from what is there. You get the pages that were fully written, and the report says how many.
No, and it is important to be clear about that. A recovered PDF is rebuilt from whatever survived, so the byte stream is different even where the content is identical. Compare the visible content, not the hash — and if the file matters legally, re-obtain the original rather than relying on a recovery.
Rebuild the cross-reference table from the objects present. Reconstruct a missing trailer. Recover page objects from a truncated file by scanning. Extract the embedded images and rebuild a document from them. Finally, render every page that can be located. Each is more invasive than the last, and the first one that works is used.
No. Repair rebuilds a file so it can be opened; it does not assess what is inside. If the file came from an untrusted source, treat the recovered output as untrusted too. Flattening it removes embedded scripts, which helps, but the right response to a suspicious file is not opening it at all.
Then the damage is deeper than a recoverable structural problem, and the honest answer is that it may not be recoverable. Try the salvage strategy anyway — the images path recovers content from files whose page structure is unrecoverable — and if that produces nothing, the source needs to be obtained again.
Because the repair preserved the content rather than normalising it, and the reader is choking on something the repair left in place. Re-saving the recovered file usually clears the stale structure. If it still fails, the last strategy — a render-and-rebuild — produces a file with no history of the original structure at all.
Yes. Free, no account, no watermark, and no upload. A corrupt file is often a file you cannot get back, which makes sending it to a stranger's server the worst possible first attempt.
More security & privacy — all free, no upload.