InDesign cc2018 crashes when saving and problems with autosave

Hello,

I'm back here because again the file I have worked on last week is "impossible to open"

4 hours of work, saved on a PDF, are now no longer available.

My pc has two hard disk, a SSD where the program run from, and a SATA where I save the data. All linked objects are in a subdirectory that exist inside the same folder as the indd file. No cloud connected to the folder, all I do is copying the file once they have been saved.

I experience this randomly happen a bit too often for a professional program and I am loosing really too much, despite being so careful on saving and saving with a new name quite often.

I am pretty sure last time I had saved the file and closed indesign I had no crash on my way. The file is not a 0Kb file, it is there but simply won't open.

I cannot afford this in my job and I am really going to think carefully about keeping indesign in my work if this is not solved.

Let me know if I can give you reports on any sort, or send a damaged file.

OK then. As long as the same IDMLs have not been used repeatedly then there are some other things to try.

First of all you mentioned that you are using a google drive as part of your workflow. There have been many reports here of incompatibility of google drives with InDesign. I would suggest doing and saving all of your work locally and at the end of each work session then exporting your .indd files. As far as I can tell from the reports that I've seen this is a problem that is more likely to be solved by contacting google.

If that does not work and since you said that this problem has been only occurring recently—possibly as a result of updates to the google drive but also possibly the result of some corruption in your version of InDesign—then there are some standard trouble-shooting methods that you can try.

Trashing Preferences

You can try the quick way of resetting on a PC which is to hold down Ctrl + Alt + Shift when launching InDesign and respond affirmatively when asked if you want to reset. There have been some recent reports that the window asking if you want to reset is not popping up but that the prefs are being reset anyway. If this works great but if it doesn’t you may have to manually delete them.

To do so:

On Windows 7 and above the preference files are hidden. To find them go to the Control Panel and open Folder Options and then click the View tab. Then select “Show hidden files and folders” or “Show hidden files, folders or drive options” in Advanced Settings. Then delete (or rename) the folder at the end of this path: C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\InDesign\<Version #>\<Language>. Make sure that InDesign is closed when you do this. When you relaunch the program it will create  new preference files and the program will be at its default settings.

The advantage of manually deleting preference files is that after you’ve reset up the program (make sure that no document window is open) to your liking, you can create copies of your personalized “mint” preference files (make sure that you quit the program before copying them—that finalizes your customization) and use them in the future to replace any corrupt versions you may need to delete.

Uninstalling and reinstalling InDesign

In the app section of your Creative Cloud desktop app click on the “V” next to the app’s (InDesign) name and choose the “Uninstall” option from the pull-down menu that appears. After you’ve run the uninstall then use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool Use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool to solve installation problems  . Then reinstall the program through the Desktop app. Before you reinstall, once again trash all preference files to make sure that your install is completely clean. Then launch InDesign and see if the problem persists.