How to recover annotations from a damaged PDF saved in iCloud?

Question

Level 1

8 points

How to recover annotations from a damaged PDF saved in iCloud?

I have a PDF textbook saved to iCloud that I've been annotating in Files using Markup for over a month now. Up until now, Files would occasionally crash and I'd lose my most recent changes, but it would always open again and show my previously saved annotations. Today the program suddenly closed and my PDF that was originally 130+MB is now only 35 MB. I tried opening it on another device and in other programs with no luck. Is there any way for me to restore this seemingly corrupted file? Even getting just the annotations back would be so helpful. I'm not sure what else to try. I'm using an iPad Air 4th gen running 18.0.1.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: PDF crashed, shrunk in size, and now won't open

iPad Air, iPadOS 18

Posted on Jun 9, 2025 10:04 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Jun 13, 2025 07:12 AM in response to ItsLeaNicole

At iCloud.com there are backups to some files in the Data Recovery section.

If you have Settings>Apple ID>iCloud Backup turned on, then you may be able to go there to recover data from the last 30 days or so, but you would need to look at the date of the backup to be sure it's from before you lost the files. You should look here:

View and manage iCloud device backups - Apple Support

This requires you to erase everything on your iPad and replace it with the backup.

If you don't keep your own backups to an external drive, then there really isn't any place else to look.

Reply

How to recover annotations from a damaged PDF saved in iCloud?

Similar questions