It's common for hard shutdowns to corrupt important files, such as the PLP, KERNELSTART, and KERNELSTOP files. A hard shutdown refers to an improper shutdown, where the CPU on the lidar system is not able to complete it's normal shutdown process. This is commonly caused by an interruption in power to the lidar system. Interrupting the normal shutdown procedure can result in broken files. Broken files will typically appear as 0 KB in size.

If your PLP file is broken, you can use the BACKUP file for processing. Simply change the file extension of the BACKUP file to PLP (e.g. "example.backup" becomes "example.plp"). The BACKUP file can then be opened as a PLP in SpatialExplorer.