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I
iglulu
Participant
February 18, 2025
Question

InDesign file crashes instantly when opening

  • February 18, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 63 views

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
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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