Is there any way to deal with corrupt pages in non-OCR'd PDF files that occur after copying?

October 15, 2009 8:47 AM

Is there any way to deal with corrupt pages in non-OCR'd PDF files that occur after copying?

I've been steadily scanning my backlog of personal papers with a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, which scans to PDF. The older version of the ScanSnap could not automatically recognize (OCR) scanned documents, but rather treated them as image-based PDFs. I copied these files for backup and general use, often deleting the originals.

Recently, when I've tried to open these files, there have been several pages inside that are blank. In Adobe Reader I get the message "Not enough information for an image", while in Foxit Reader I get a garbled or smeared version of the page. This is annoying and fairly traumatizing since I often don't have the original.

So, a few questions for those who have experience with the ScanSnap and/or PDFs of this type:

1) Is there any way to recover the lost information?
2) Does this only happen with non-OCR'd PDFs? Could it ever happen to a "normal" PDF with a layer of text?
3) What if I scan handwritten notes, which have no recognizable text? If I OCR them (with the newer ScanSnap, which permits this), will they still be vulnerable to corrupt pages in the future?
4) Is there a "safer" way to copy that will not result in lost data?

Thanks much.

posted by mjklin to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Your files got corrupted at some point. This could have happened during the copy, or the disk or disc your backups are on could have flaked out somehow. The OCR/non-OCR thing doesn't matter; this can happen to any kind of PDF or any kind of file on your computer, and, unfortunately, there's nothing you can do to prevent it other than having more backups on more drives that are kept in separate places. What OS are you using? There are several tools that can verify backups.
posted by zsazsa at 10:17 AM on October 15, 2009

I just went through a situation where I had a corrupt (un-openable) Adobe illustrator file that I could still open in Adobe Acrobat, so you might try to open the PDFs in a few other apps? e.g Photoshop? Something like ACDSee/random file viewer?
posted by misterbrandt at 1:10 PM on October 15, 2009