How to recover a corrupted PDF (free methods first)

What's actually wrong

Most 'corrupt' PDFs suffer from a damaged cross-reference table or trailer while the page objects remain intact — that's the 'opens in a browser but not in Acrobat' case, and it's highly recoverable. Truncated files (interrupted save/download) lose only the pages after the cut. Files overwritten with zeros or encrypted by ransomware are genuinely unrecoverable. Here is the honest order of methods, free first.

Free fixes — try these first

1. Open in a web browser (Chrome/Edge) → Print → Save as PDF. Fixes the majority of index-damage cases for free.
2. Google Drive: upload → open → File → Download. Drive re-writes a clean copy.
3. SumatraPDF / macOS Preview — tolerant readers that open many damaged files.
4. Check cloud version history (OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox) for an intact earlier version.

If the free fixes fail

When the container is broken badly enough that no reader will open it, manual methods stop working. Our analyzer reads the damaged file directly, rebuilds the cross-reference table around every surviving object, and shows exactly how many pages it recovered — in your browser, before any payment.