A best-effort, plain-English read on a PDF's history — what likely made it, whether its metadata looks consistent, and roughly how old it really is.
1. Choose a PDF to inspect
One file per inquiry. Nothing about your file is uploaded — only a short summary of its metadata fields is sent off for the write-up below.
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Drop your PDF here or click to browse
History report
See the raw metadata this was based on
Links found in this file
Nothing is checked automatically — click "Check Wayback Machine" on a link only if you want that URL sent to archive.org's public lookup.
Investigate further
Recover a folder's history from Thumbs.db
A separate, best-effort tool. Windows sometimes leaves a hidden Thumbs.db file behind in a folder — it can retain filenames and thumbnail previews of files that were once there, even after they were deleted or renamed.
Choose a Thumbs.db file
This is a different file than your PDF — it's a hidden file Windows creates named exactly "Thumbs.db", usually found in the same folder as the files it's caching. Nothing is uploaded; everything is read in your browser.
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Drop a Thumbs.db file here or click to browse
Thumbs.db findings
Honest limits: Thumbs.db's format is old, undocumented by Microsoft, and varies by Windows version. This tool handles the classic per-folder format (Windows XP through 8.1-era network shares) with reasonable confidence, verified against a hand-built test file — but some thumbnails use an older raw format this tool can't render, and newer per-folder files sometimes skip the filename index entirely, in which case only thumbnail images (no names) can be recovered. A corrupted or unsupported file will fail gracefully with a message rather than showing wrong data.