Indesign deleted text after crashing

Hello! Yes exactly this issue has happened to me. The large document crashes and InDesign has deleted text from an entire page leaving behind the design of the page. I recover the file but unless there is something obvious missing I have no way to check what text has been deleted, or changes deleted, from a 300 page book. It's terrifying that I know there is likely content deleted but I have no way to check what has gone. This has happened to me on 4 separate times in this one document. 

Unfortunately, lesson learned the hard way 😞

Don't know about Mac - but as you are on a PC - the easiest way to get automatic incremental backup in Windows - Ctrl+S in the InDesign, then Alt+Tab to switch to the folder where your INDD file is saved, select this INDD file - if you won't do anything else in the folder then your INDD file will be preselected - then Ctrl+C then Ctrl+V - Windows will take care to increase the counter of the copy.

Try to do it as often as possible - storage space is cheap 😉 - either every 15-20 minutes or less often - if you make less / minor changes. 

Then at the end of the day - leave few "major" copies - one from each hour and delete the rest. 

And don't forget to do SAVE AS with a new name from time to time - once a day? 

When you just hit Ctrl+S - all the info required for Undo is preserved in the INDD file - but unaccessible after you close your INDD file - and stays there forever increasing size of the INDD file and increasing chances to get file corrupted when InDesign crashes - not to mention it slows down opening of the file.

And less often - you should do export / Save As as IDML - this is the best way to clean INDD file - it gets rid of all the previews and fixes a lot of gremlins - like crashing when trying to access specific page or moving specific object. 

Back up your work regularly. Whether you make a mistake because you're tired or rushing things, or ID or your system fouls up, lost work is lost work. Back up your INDD files at least daily on all but trivial projects, and whole project folders at least once a week or so.

Doesn't help in this case, no, but it will help take the sting out of the next incident. 🙂

Hi @Martina zstudio:

I was just wondering if anyone had similar experiance.

No, I have not and I use InDesign pretty much every day. Looking ahead, consider saving to a cloud drive that offers automatic incremental backups (i.e., Creative Cloud storage, Dropbox, etc). That way, you can easily recover a previous version of a file. Alternatively, get in the habit of saving your own incremental back-ups (daily perhaps, or more frequently depending on how much you are working on a file each day.) Drives can fail—we need to be proactive in our back-ups. I think it is safe to say we've all been in this sort of situation at some point (lost data for whatever reason), and it is very painful. 

~Barb

Probably you were looking at the recovered version of the InDD file when you opened up InDesign after crash. Of all things it's almost impossible to have the file content changed and saved without explicit user interaction. However, if you resaved the file I think we have no way to know. If I were you I would have closed the document, checked its modified date to identify what transpired.

-Manan