No. Repair succeeds when the page content is intact and the file's structure is what's broken — the most common case. A severely truncated file may be missing the page data itself, and nothing can rebuild content that isn't there. If the repair fails, the file is likely beyond browser-side recovery.

What gets lost in the repair?

Bookmarks, interactive form fields, and metadata beyond title/author/subject are not carried into the rebuilt file. Page content — text, images, layout — is what's preserved. Re-add navigation with the PDF Bookmarks tool and metadata with the Edit Metadata tool if the document needs them.

The repaired file is a different size than the original. Is that bad?

It's expected. The output is written fresh with clean, compactly-serialized structure, so the size routinely differs in either direction. What matters is whether the pages render correctly.

What if repair fails entirely?

Two salvage routes: if any viewer can still render the file, print it to a new PDF from that viewer; and the Extract Images tool can sometimes pull embedded images (like scanned page images) out of files too broken to repair wholesale. Beyond that, re-obtain the file — and check whether the original download was simply incomplete.

Repair PDF

Attempt to repair a damaged or corrupted PDF file. Files are processed entirely in your browser.

Drop PDF files here or browse

Max 200MB per file

About Repair Corrupted PDF

PDFs break in mundane ways: a download cut off early, a cloud sync conflict, a buggy generator writing a malformed file. The symptom is a viewer refusing the file — 'the file is damaged and could not be repaired' — or pages that render blank. Often the page content inside is fine and only the file's structural bookkeeping is broken.

Convertora's repair tool rebuilds the document around the surviving content: it parses the damaged file as tolerantly as possible, then copies every readable page into a brand-new, cleanly-written PDF. The output has fresh, valid structure regardless of how mangled the original's was — which is exactly what cures the most common class of corruption.

Honesty about the trade-off: the rebuild recovers pages, not features. Bookmarks, interactive form behavior, and most metadata are not preserved — the title, author, and subject fields are carried over, and that's it. A repaired file is a clean copy of the content, not a clone of the original. And if the damage reaches the page data itself, no structural rebuild can resurrect it.

How to use it

1Upload the broken PDF — this tool accepts files up to 200 MB, double the usual limit, since partially-downloaded large files are a common patient.
2Click Repair. The file is parsed leniently and every recoverable page is copied into a freshly constructed document.
3Title, author, and subject metadata are carried over where readable; everything else is rebuilt from scratch.
4Download the repaired file, saved with a -repaired suffix, and page through it to confirm what survived.

Common use cases

Rescuing a PDF that a viewer rejects outright even though it 'looks' like a complete download.
Fixing malformed files produced by buggy export features or homegrown PDF generators.
Cleaning up a file that opens in one application but fails in another, stricter one.
Producing a structurally valid copy of an old file before feeding it into other tools that choke on it.

Frequently asked questions

Tips

If the file came from the internet, re-downloading it takes ten seconds and fixes the most common corruption cause — try that before anything else.
Compare page counts after repairing: if the output has fewer pages than the original claimed, the missing ones were unrecoverable, and you'll want to know which before relying on the file.

100% private — runs in your browser

Convertora processes everything on your device using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Files never leave your browser, are never uploaded to a server, and are never seen by us or anyone else. The moment you close the tab, the data is gone — there is no temporary cloud copy, no log entry, no retained backup.

Because the work happens locally, processing speed depends on your device — but there are no rate limits, no daily caps, and no file size restrictions beyond what your browser can handle in memory. No signup, no account, no payment. The tool works the same in incognito mode, on a corporate network, or after the page has loaded once, even with the network disconnected.