PDF document recovery options and guides.
Upload a PDF that won't open. We rebuild it from what's still inside and show you a free recovery summary — page and object counts and a short excerpt of recovered text. If the summary shows what you need, unlock the repaired file for a one-time $12.
Repair a corrupted PDF onlineFree preview — pay only if you download ($12)
Your files auto-delete — delete them sooner anytime
No person looks at your file as part of repair
Uploading your file.
Keep this tab open while the file transfers. Large files can take a few minutes.
Starting upload...
Recovering what we can.
Analyzing your file...
Here's what we recovered.
Review the recovery summary before checkout.
Your files auto-delete — delete them sooner anytime
No person looks at your file as part of repair
Repair your file
Choose a supported file to see what can be repaired before checkout.
Simulated checkout — no payment is processed.
Optional — we'll email your private download link.
You preview before you pay. If the download is materially worse than the preview you approved, we'll refund you.
Try another fileGood news — your file isn't damaged. No charge.
There's nothing to repair. If it still looks broken, the issue may be the player, codec, or viewer on your device rather than the file itself.
We couldn't recover this one.
The file is too damaged to rebuild, so there is nothing to preview and no charge.
Have another clip from the same device?
A healthy video recorded on the same device — ideally the same settings — gives the repair engine a template to rebuild from. It can unlock repairs that fail on their own.
Unrepaired files are kept encrypted for up to 30 days, then deleted.
FileFix can't fix that kind of file yet.
Right now we repair video, audio, document, and image files (MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV, AVI, TS, MTS, M2TS, MPG, MPEG, VOB, 3GP, WebM, FLV, M4A, WAV, MP3, AAC, FLAC, OGG, AIFF, XLSX, DOCX, PPTX, ODT, ZIP, PDF, AI, HEIC, and HEIF). We're adding support for more formats over time.
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Why PDF readers stop loading a file
A PDF is a graph of numbered objects for pages, fonts, text, images, forms, and other content. A cross-reference table and trailer tell a reader where those objects are and how the document is rooted. Readers can fail when those pointers are missing, stale, or cut off even though some objects remain in the file.
A truncated download can remove the final trailer. An interrupted save can leave an older cross-reference entry pointing to the wrong offset. Stray bytes or a malformed object stream can also cause one reader to stop parsing the document.
FileFix runs multiple PDF recovery and rewrite paths, then reopens each candidate without recovery mode. Candidates must contain at least one readable page; the selected result is the validated candidate with the highest page count, then object count.
The recovery summary reports those page and object counts and attempts a short text excerpt from simple text operations. It does not treat an absent excerpt as proof that a page is empty, and it does not claim to recreate content streams or pages that are missing from the uploaded bytes.
You never install anything, and you don't create an account to try it. You upload, you read the recovery summary, you decide.
What we can and can't recover
We can usually fix
- PDFs that show "the file is damaged and could not be repaired"
- PDFs Chrome or Edge won't open ("Failed to load PDF document")
- Files cut off mid-download or mid-save
- PDFs with a broken cross-reference table or trailer
We can't fix
- Password-protected or encrypted PDFs
- Genuinely empty (0-byte) files
- Deleted or formatted files (that's data recovery, a different job)
- Pages whose content was never written to disk
How it works
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Upload Drop the file in. It uploads over an encrypted connection. The repair runs automatically — no person looks at your file.
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Free Watermarked Preview You see exactly what we recovered — page and object counts and a short excerpt of recovered text.
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Pay & Download If the summary shows what you need, unlock the repaired PDF for a one-time $12.
You see a recovery summary built from your actual file before you decide anything — so you never guess.
See what's recoverable.
Free recovery summary · private & auto-deleted
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Questions
The engine tries several PDF recovery and rewrite paths, including reconstructing damaged cross-reference information. Each candidate is reopened without recovery mode and counted for readable pages and objects before the best validated result is selected.
It shows the number of pages and PDF objects in the validated repaired file, plus a short text excerpt when readable text operators can be extracted. The excerpt may be empty for image-only or specially encoded pages.
It can. Rewriting a damaged PDF preserves readable objects, but missing fonts, images, content streams, annotations, forms, bookmarks, or relationships cannot be recreated. Use the summary as evidence that a PDF was rebuilt, then inspect the downloaded document before relying on its layout.
No. This is corruption repair, not password removal. Encrypted or password-protected PDFs are outside the repair flow.
A page can be structurally readable while its content is an image, uses font encodings the summary does not decode, or has no simple text-drawing operators. Page recovery and text extraction are different checks.
The engine validates the candidates it can produce and selects by recovered page count, then object count. The free summary reports counts from that selected file.
A one-time $12 — and only if the repair works. The recovery summary is free, and checkout is unavailable when no repair path produces a validated PDF with at least one page.
No. Repair, validation, and summary generation are automated. Originals of successful repairs are deleted when your repair is delivered; unrepaired files are kept encrypted for up to 30 days, then deleted.
No. FileFix performs the repair on its servers. You only need a PDF reader to inspect the downloaded result.
No. The engine can reorganize and rewrite PDF objects that remain in the uploaded bytes. It cannot recreate a page or content stream that never arrived.
Not necessarily. The summary extracts a limited set of PDF text-drawing operations; it does not run OCR. Scanned pages can contribute to the page count while producing no excerpt.
Do not rely on it. PDF repair rewrites the file, while a digital signature authenticates specific original bytes. Verify signatures independently and obtain a fresh signed copy when authenticity matters.
No. It writes a separate repaired PDF from a validated candidate. The original file on your device remains unchanged.