As I am sure happens with other customers, we have an issue where some of our PDF documents were damaged. A data room service had an incident where downloaded files were truncated. In some cases, the files will not open in Adobe, but they will open in other programs such as Microsoft Edge or SumatraPDF. This is because the footer is damaged, but while Adobe will not open a file that is missing the %%EOF statement or other portions of the PDF document specification, these programs ignore some portions of the specification that are not essential to the data within the document.

Short-term:
1. I would like assistance determining whether the truncated portion of my documents includes document content, or just the footer. While I can see the file is truncated in a hex editor, I do not know the PDF specification well enough to tell where the content ends and the footer starts. I understand there may be a way to recover the documents if just the footer is damaged, but if any document contents are damaged, I should not spend any more time hoping to recover the documents.

Long-Term:
2. Access to a program from Adobe that is not as strict about following PDF specification standards. I understand this may not be possible as it may circumvent document security Adobe wants to enforce, but might be extremely useful in helping myself and others to recover data from damaged PDFs. Several other programs were able to open 30-40% of the damaged documents. I assume this is because Adobe demands a %%EOF or other specification standards or it won't open the document, but these other programs are not as strict in forcing documents to adhere to PDF specification standards.

1. A PDF recovery service from Adobe. In looking to repair these files, there are several PDF repair services out there that allow you to demo with the first page, or alternate pages of a document to see if it can be recovered, however, they are often not trusted sources, or cloud solutions that may or may not retain your data. When documents are important enough to recover, we would appreciate a trusted partner to help recover files.