Cannot open recovered files. Message says "Does not appear to be SketchUp file. Help anyone?
Could you upload the file here, so we could inspect?
Confirm the file extension is *.skp
This is one of many (unfortunately) files I cannot open.
I did. Still could not open,
Note:
The forum limits uploads to 3MB.
If your file is larger you’ll need to load it to a site with a larger limit.
Try Google Drive, DropBox or the 3D Warehouse and post a link back here.
Also please say more about what you did to “recover” the file. Did you find it in the trash bin and copy it back from there, or did you resort to some more drastic method or tool? Simply copying back from the trash should be ok, but other techniques could have subtly damaged the file.
Will send link to my G drive as soon as I get file(s) uploaded.
One of the causes for corrupt SKPs is the addition of corrupt image files used as SU materials. By any chance are you using the same material(s) in the problem files?
Hey,
the exact same thing happened to me. Switching computers, I thought I had transferred everything, turns out there is an important .skp file that had been deleted. I used a recovery tool (disk drill) and was able to recover both, .skp and .skb versions of the document, but both say “does not appear to be a Sketchup file”.
Is there a way to repair it?
Probably, but you must share your file so @colin can check if there’s something to recover, anyways don’t keep high expectations, a lot of files that have been recovered after being deleted get corrupted and lost forever.
Thanks for the quick response. I have loaded both to dropbox an am pasting the links below.
Unfortunately, recovery programs are only occasionally able to correctly recover a binary file such as a skp or skp. Recovery involves searching through the currently unused fragments on the disc, looking for one that appears to continue from what has been found so far. With a text file that involves looking for fragments of text that seem to complete the last sentence found. For binary data the whole idea of completing what’s been found is almost uselessly vague!
And modern OSs all manage a pool of available spots on the disc and assign them to a file as needed. If the fragments of a deleted file happen to get reassigned and overwritten, nothing short of super-advanced forensic software can recover anything.
So, unless you get very lucky it is not likely that a recovered skp or skp will be salvageable.
I doubt that Colin will have any luck but maybe. It looks like the majority of the file is corrupted. I downloaded your .skp file. It shows as 18,957,338 bytes. I zipped it up and the zipped file is 22,475 bytes or about 1.2% of the .skp file. A viable 2021 or later SketchUp file should only zip to about 98% or so of the .skp file’s size.
Ok I understand. And it is not the end of the world for me, just a lot of work. I will then start over from square one and take it as a lesson learned. 
Sometimes a section of the file is filled with zeros, enough to make it not possible to recover anything. In your case both files are 100% zeros. You can do a test where you make the file be a zip archive. The zip is only 19,176 bytes, because of how well all of the zeros compressed.
If you have a copy of the file that compresses and still is close to 19 MB, that would be worth trying to recover.
I did the compress test, both files compress to 19KB, as you stated. So it is no use. Thank you anyway for checking this out for me, I appreciate it!
And I don´t seem to have a different copy besides this one. So we will leave it at that.