File went bad, any help?

[TheCandyman]

I have a Indesign CS3 file that went bad(on page 70 of 72, ouch). I can open other files and everything works great, it's just this one file. I saved every 30 minutes, but the power flickered and now i can't open it. when i try to open, it starts, says it can't find fonts, then crashes and kills InDesign also.

Are there any programs to recover these files?

 

[eugenetyson]

Can you place the files into InDesign? You can place CS3 docs inside of other CS3 docs. You can then export that to a PDF. Then you can download PDF2InD from Recosoft.

Have you updated your CS3, 5.01 is out. This may help to fix the file.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/

or choose Help>Update from within InDesign, with no docs open.

When you go to open the file does it ask, do you want to open the backup. Select NO. Then it opens the file, hopefully. Export to InDesign Interchange (*.inx) and then reopen in CS3. That should clear your problem. You will need to resave it as a CS3 .indd file.

 

[TheCandyman]

I'm up to date on CS3.

I have selected NO, then tried to open the file but still the same thing.

I have never imported a file within a file, how do i do that?

 

[eugenetyson]

Make a new document, the same size as the rest of your documents.

Then the same as placing any file, image or PDF

File>Place

Then that will place an uneditable thumbnail of your file. When you export to PDF you should be able to edit it and even save it as a RTF or something and redo it that way.

I just tried this out. On a file that had effects like drop shadow and outer glow, I was unable to edit the text in the PDF.

But I was able to do with text that didn't have any effects and select and change text in the PDF. You can save it as RTF there too and reimport that as text back into InDesign, but you'll have to load the styles on again, if you have any.

 

[eugenetyson]

You could try these... i'm not sure how good they are though????

Email

FileRepair@CorruptedDataRecovery.com

 

[TheCandyman]

I tried the place option, but got this:
"Can not place this file. No filter found for requested operation" Suggestions?

I did email that company but never got a response, thanks for the suggestion though.

 

[eugenetyson]

It seems that the data is corrupt... you may have to google some file repair people and see if they can help.

 

[TheCandyman]

Thanks eugenetyson,

I searched around about an hour, but didn't find anything guess i just have to start over.

 

[maplepub]

This won't help you with this particular file, but from now on you could do this:

Every couple hours (or more often if you're working quickly), go out to the Finder and Duplicate (Command-D) the freshly saved file. It will be duped right next to the original with "copy" appended. That way, if your vital document gets corrupted or you do something horrible that's not undo-able, you have a clean recent copy and don't lose too much work. You could also "Save A Copy" from within ID. The app kindly takes care of keeping your working document saved and restorable from minor crashes. This duping thing is to save the bacon if the document itself becomes unusable.

Along with this, I make sure to shut down CS3 and restart the Mac once a day when I'm working hard and heavy, to clear out the cobwebs, gremlins and bugs that can build up from processing so much information.

 

[eugenetyson]

Actually, InDesign saves a copy of the file every minute. If you go through the preferences you will see where InDesign saves these files... I'm not sure if it's still recoverable from here though, they are only temporary files.

 

[maplepub]

Right. As I said, ID kindly takes care of normal saving for you. But that doesn't help if the file suddenly gets corrupted and you can't open it. Thus having a recent duplicate is nice insurance.

 

[eugenetyson]

Absolutely, I just thought of the autobackup that InDesign creates and it could be there, just waiting to be found. It's not an easy folder to get to. But hey all things said are good, so far.

 

[eugenetyson]

More info here

http://indesignsecrets.com/fixing-indesigns-mac-template-files.php

 

[maplepub]

In my case, the temporary file seems to reside in the same folder as the original. Of course it only exists while you have the original open. I wouldn't risk double-clicking the temp file while the original is open; that might cause corruption right there, I would think.

 

[eugenetyson]

That temp file you see there when an InDesign Document isn't your document at all... it's called a IDLK, or InDesign Locked file. It's only there to keep others from opening it on another computer or to stop you opening the file twice or something. It's not the data that is in your file, actually it's a 0kb file.

http://indesignsecrets.com/can-i-open-an-indesign-lock-idlk-file.php

 

[eugenetyson]

In Windows the Document Recovery Data is stored

In my case

C:\Documents and Settings\Eugene\Local settings\ Application Data\Adobe\InDesign\Version 5.0\Caches\InDesign Recovery


You find out where your files are stored by clicking on

Edit>Preferences>File Handling

At the moment, without any files open I have 6 files in there.

You can just add the extension .indd to the end to open them with InDesign... I think.

 

[eugenetyson]

Actually no you can't do this, I was thinking about Quark Xpress, that has Auto Backup. As regards indesing, these appear to be just mini files that are reincorporated into damaged files when you try to open a file that closed suddenly without saving, so you basically should in theory lose just one minute of work.

But that's all the temp files and backup files that InDesign doe, IDLK and mini recovery files. That's it.