Indesign appeared with a damaged file warning and now i cant select or move any of the elements

Question

Hello,

Please help! I was working on an indesign document, I went to save the file as a precaution to anything happening before i was finished with the document. After I clicked save indesign flashed up with a dialogie box saying that the file had been damaged and suddenly it was as if indesign had frozen. I can no longer, select or move any of the element on any of the pages. I can turn the layers on and off, chnahge the layer order, "save" the file but nothing changes. I have tried:

turning off my GPU

saving as an IDML

Restarting my computer

I cant find the auotsaves either. I'm on a mac and when i select the "users" folder, im barred access to all the folders despite ebing the administrator on the account.

I have my final university deadline in a week and really need to sort this out ASAP!!

Thank you

Katie Houghton · Accepted Answer

There is always the chance of the document file going corrupt. I have been versioning my files for years just incase of such an occurance. I would try to reset your preferences:

1. Exit the application
2. Press and hold Shift+Ctrl+Alt (Windows) or Shift+Option+Command+Control (macOS) as you start InDesign. You are prompted to delete the current settings. The new preferences files are created when you start the application.

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To check the corrupted file vs if it is the preferences/application you can try these steps:

1. Try opening the file on another computer running InDesign (shows if the file is corrupt. If your file is opening on another system with InDesign and working fine then you know it is InDesign creating the problem. If the file is not working/or opening in InDesign then you know it is corrupted. )

2. Try a different file in the current version of InDesign (shows if the app is malfunctioning in all cases. If it works with a different file then the file you were saving is causing the problem)

3. Try opening a file on the same computer with InDesign under a new user. (Shows if the preferences are the problem. If the new user works fine the it is your preferences)

Hope this helps.

Barb Binder · Answer

Here is a list of steps to follow when you have a damaged file.

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/kb/troubleshoot-file-issues.html

You can also send the file to Adobe to take a look at. Email the file to idfile@adobe.com .

Finally, there is a paid service that will work on restoring a damaged file: https://markzware.com/products/file-recovery-service/.

And this advice is a little late for this time, but this is why you need to make incremental backups. Any file can become corrupt over time. If you don't want to do repeated save as commands, then you could save to a shared drive like dropbox which allows you to get back to automatic incremental backups over 30 days.

~Barb

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