Repair PDF — Fix Corrupted Files Free

Upload a damaged, broken or unreadable PDF and get a repaired version in seconds. Reconstructs corrupt cross-reference tables, recovers pages from truncated files and fixes structural errors — no account needed, files deleted immediately after download.

or drag & drop your PDF here
Single PDF  •  Up to 15 MB  •  Free forever
No files stored
Done in seconds
No watermarks

What This PDF Repair Tool Does

This tool attempts to recover a working PDF from a file that is damaged, corrupted, truncated or fails to open. It runs up to three repair strategies in sequence, stopping as soon as one succeeds. First, qpdf performs a full structural rebuild — it reconstructs the cross-reference table (the internal index that tells PDF viewers where each object is), removes invalid references, and rewrites the file as a clean linearised PDF. This resolves the vast majority of files that crash PDF viewers or display "file is damaged" errors.

If that is not sufficient, a pypdf page-by-page recovery extracts each page individually, skipping any that are unreadable, and assembles the recoverable ones into a new PDF. This approach works on files where the structural index is completely destroyed but the page content streams themselves are intact. As a final fallback, pdftk attempts its own independent repair and rewrite. After a successful repair, the result card shows the method used, the original and repaired file sizes, and any warnings about pages that could not be recovered.

Fixes corrupt xref tables

Reconstructs the internal cross-reference index that PDF viewers use to locate pages and objects.

Recovers truncated files

Extracts readable pages from files that were cut off mid-transfer or saved incompletely.

Three-strategy pipeline

qpdf structural rebuild → pypdf page recovery → pdftk fallback. Each catches damage the others miss.

Works on any device

No software to install. Upload from Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS — any modern browser.

Tips for the Best Repair Results

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this PDF repair tool completely free?

Yes, completely free with no hidden conditions. There are no usage limits, no account required, and no watermarks are added to your repaired PDF. You can repair as many files as you need without any cap. Convixy's tools are funded by advertising, not paywalls.

The only constraint is a 15 MB upload limit. Most PDFs that need repair are documents, reports or forms that fall well within this limit. If your PDF is a large scanned document near the limit, try Compress PDF to reduce the original first, or split it with Split PDF if the file opens partially.

What types of PDF damage can be repaired?

The most common and most successfully repaired type is a corrupt cross-reference table — the internal index that tells PDF viewers where each object is located in the file. When this is damaged, viewers report "file is damaged" or "cannot open PDF" even though the actual page content is fine. qpdf's structural rebuild reconstructs this from scratch by scanning the raw file bytes, fixing the issue completely in the vast majority of cases.

Other repairable conditions include invalid or mismatched object sizes, truncated files where some pages are intact, garbled file headers that prevent the viewer from recognising the file as a PDF, and files saved with incorrect byte-offset calculations. What cannot be repaired is damage to the page content data itself — if the actual text, images or graphics streams are overwritten with garbage data, there is nothing to recover, as the content no longer exists in the file.

What does the repair process actually do?

The tool runs up to three repair strategies in sequence, stopping as soon as one succeeds. qpdf linearize performs a full structural rebuild: it reads every object in the PDF's raw byte stream, rebuilds the cross-reference table from scratch, resolves object references, and rewrites the entire file as a clean linearised PDF. This is the fastest and most thorough repair for structurally corrupt files. Exit code 3 from qpdf indicates partial recovery with warnings — these are surfaced to you in the result card.

If qpdf cannot produce a valid output, pypdf attempts a page-by-page extraction with strict mode disabled, which means it ignores structural errors and attempts to read each page independently. Pages it cannot parse are skipped, and the recoverable ones are assembled into a new PDF. If both fail, pdftk makes a final attempt using its own independent repair implementation. The result card always tells you which method succeeded and flags any pages that had to be omitted.

Can every damaged PDF be repaired?

No. The repairability of a PDF depends on what exactly is damaged. If only the structural metadata — the cross-reference table, object offsets, trailer dictionary — is corrupt, repair is almost always successful because the actual page content is intact. If the page content streams themselves — the compressed data that contains text, images and graphics — are overwritten or missing, there is nothing to recover: the data simply does not exist in the file any more.

The most common successful cases are files downloaded over an unstable connection (interrupted mid-download), files transferred via USB where the device was unplugged before the write completed, and files where the PDF viewer crashed during saving and wrote a partial or corrupt index. The most common irrecoverable cases are storage media with physical sector failures affecting the content streams, or files where a ransomware or overwrite attack replaced the content with zeros or random data.

Why does the repaired PDF sometimes have fewer pages than the original?

When pypdf's page-by-page recovery mode is used, it attempts to extract each page independently. Pages whose content streams are unreadable — because the data is genuinely missing or overwritten — are skipped rather than causing the whole repair to fail. The result card will tell you exactly how many pages were skipped. This is a partial recovery rather than a full one, but it is better than no recovery at all.

If you have a backup copy of the original or any other version of the file with the missing pages intact, use Merge PDF to combine the recovered pages with the backup to reconstruct as complete a document as possible. The Split PDF tool can help you extract the specific pages you need from each source before merging.

Can I repair a password-protected PDF?

PDFs that require a password to open cannot be repaired, because the repair engine needs full read access to the document's content streams and object dictionary to reconstruct the file structure. If you know the password, unlock the file in Adobe Acrobat, Preview (macOS), or any PDF editor that supports password removal, then upload the unlocked version here.

PDFs with owner-level restrictions that limit printing, copying or editing but do not require a password to open can usually be repaired without any issue, since the repair engine only needs read access to the file's byte stream to function.

Are my files private and secure?

Yes. All file transfers happen over encrypted HTTPS. Once your repaired PDF is generated and downloaded, both the uploaded original and the repaired output are automatically deleted from Convixy's servers — typically within the same session and always within one hour. We do not read, store, index or share your document content under any circumstances.

No account is required, so there is no user profile associated with your uploads. This tool is safe to use with confidential legal documents, financial records, medical files and any other sensitive content you need to recover.

What can I do with the PDF after repairing it?

Once you have a working PDF, Convixy has tools for every next step. To reduce the file size before sharing or uploading to a portal, use Compress PDF. To combine the repaired document with other files into a single deliverable, use Merge PDF. To extract only specific pages from the recovered file, use Split PDF. To add a "REPAIRED" or "RECOVERED" stamp to the document for audit trail purposes, use Watermark PDF.

All tools are free, require no account and delete your files immediately after download. If you are working with a document that originated in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, re-converting it from the source file using Word to PDF, Excel to PDF or PowerPoint to PDF will always produce a cleaner result than repairing a damaged export.

My PDF still won't open after repair — what else can I try?

If all three repair strategies fail, the damage is severe enough that server-side tools cannot recover the content. At this point, the options are: try a specialist desktop PDF recovery tool such as PDF-XChange Editor's repair function or Stellar Repair for PDF, which use additional heuristic recovery algorithms; contact the original sender or system that produced the file and request a fresh export or re-send; or check cloud storage version history in Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or iCloud — these services retain 30 to 180 days of version history and an uncorrupted version may be accessible there.

For very important documents, a professional data recovery service may be able to recover content at the byte level from the storage medium itself, which can succeed even when software tools fail. This is a last resort and is only worthwhile for documents of significant legal or financial value where no other copy exists.