Those are happy ones CorelDraw users who never experienced CorelDraw’s crash. This is really frustrating to loose your hard work. It’s twice frustrating with CorelDraw as it loves to clean up your file and leave just few bytes in size file. So it happened to me just now. Well it’s good when you have Backup_of_filename.cdr file on disk. Sometimes you don’t, like I did not in my case.
So I was working with CorelDraw X4 and it unexpectedly… not even crashed, it just diapeared from my screen, like it never been there. All I was left with was temporary CorelDraw file @@@CDRW.TMP with size of few megabytes and my_filename.cdr of few bytes in size. Opening my_filename.cdr with CorelDraw did not helped, CorelDraw wasn’t noticing @@@CDRW.TMP on disk and did not offer any recover option. All I was getting in blank document page.
As I’m kind of advanced PC user :-), I did quick look at @@@CDRW.TMP and i realized it’s a ZIP file actually. So I’ve renamed it to @@@CDRW.TMP.ZIP and extracted it’s content. What I got was content and metadata folders in there and links.xml file. Inside of content folder I’ve found what I was looking for - riffData.cdr. I’ve opened it with CorelDraw and got my document back, without lash changes, but at least I’ve got it back.
While writing this quick article, I’ve found that actually all .CDR files (at least CorelDraw X4 documents) are ZIP archives. So if you rename your file to .ZIP instead of .CDR you will be able to look inside. BTW, in metadata folder there is thumbnails subfolder, which caries thumbnail.bmp file. Yes, it’s actual thumbnail you see in windows explorer while observing folder with your .CDR file. So the faster way is just to RENAME @@@CDRW.TMP to my_filename.cdr and continue working with it.
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