How to Save Sketch Files to Older Versions

After updating , many plugins fail to recognize artboards/layers. However, if I open files created in 1.2 with older versions (e.g.,101.9), they either crash or display incorrectly.

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Hello @sukieeeeee, welcome to the forum!

Sketch Athens (2025.1 and later) comes with a lot of changes in core elements like Artboards (now Frames) that affect their format and overall behaviour. Therefore, many plugins that were written to work with Artboards don’t work anymore.

I’m afraid that plugins are third-party software and some are no longer maintained by their creators, sorry. In some cases, plugin developers updated their plugins, but that’s not the case in others. Could you let me know the plugins that stopped working so we can study your use case?

About reverting documents to 101.9, I’m afraid that the documents were converted to handle all the changes mentioned above, so you won’t be able to open documents alrady opened with the newer versions.

However, if you store the documents in your Sketch workspace, you can recover a previous version of the document and download it:

  1. Open the document in your workspace.
  2. Open the versions list (you can press V) and locate a version that was previous to the moment you used 2025.1 with the document for the first time.
  3. Click on the three dots ··· that appears next to the version and download it.
  4. Open that downloaded version with 101.9 You can find previous versions of Sketch here.
  5. Make sure to save this new version with 101.9. It will upload a new version that is compatible with 101.9.

The downside here is that you’ll lose all the work you did with 2025.1 and later, but that’s expected due to the new features we released, that are not compatible with 101.9 or prior.

Hope this helps!

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