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Participant
February 18, 2025
Question

InDesign file crashes instantly when opening

Hi all,

I'm currently job hunting and urgently need to edit my portfolio, but the InDesign file just won't open anymore. InDesign crashes immediately when I try to open it. I'm working on a pretty old MacBook (2013, running Big Sur 11.7.10) and I can't download the latest version of InDesign, so I thought it might be that, even though it was working fine until recently (I created the file on this MacBook and it was handling it fine). However, I tried to open it on my partner's much newer MacBook (2021), using the latest version of InDesign and its still crashing straight away.

I've trawled every forum post I can find, tried restarting everything, trashing preferences and caches, deleting recovery data, even running a script that was supposed to convert it to IDML without opening it (but it still crashed).
It's not a massive file so rebuilding it wouldn't take too long, but I'm just hoping that someone out there knows of a last option I can try that will mean I don't need to spend precious time building the file again. I know there are services you can pay for to examine or convert the file, but I'm not willing to do that.

Thanks in advance!

1 reply

Robert at ID-Tasker
Legend
February 18, 2025

If IDMLing doesn't work - then your file is corrupted beyond repair - or at least free way of repair.

 

How often are you doing SAVE AS with a new name?

 

If you don't at all - start doing it at the end of the day - or every few days, if you don't work too much on this particular file.

 

When you do just Save - InDesign preserves Undo History - which is no longer accessible to you - but stays as part of the file - making it bigger, slower and more susceptible to corruption.

 

Doing Save As with a new name - but NEVER overwrite your original file - purges all this Undo History and also rewrites your file a bit - you can call it Housekeeping.

 

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