Known Participant

Question

InDesign lost recent edits despite saving, unable to recover latest file

Forum|Forum|15 days ago
March 21, 2026
5 replies
105 views

I created a PDF on 18 March of a complex file, saved locally. Yesterday, the only file available to me was dated 15 March and was not the final file I had saved. How is this possible? I have searched high and low both on my pc and also the Adobe cloud (which I do not use), but it did not save. I’m finding ID to be extremely unstable at the moment. 2026 is impossible to use due to constant hanging, so I reverted to 2025 for this file. The only thing I changed was ‘reset preferences on exit’, because even that keeps hanging when opening paragraph styles. After that, of course, my ‘recent files’ were not available. Now, when I open the 15 March file, I’m being prompted to replace fonts I already have installed and available. There was another file I was working on, which I used to create images for the main file, and that’s also reverted to 15th March. I’ve tried the local data recovery, but they aren’t in there. What’s going on here!? I can’t believe this is possible.

M

MickRose

Participant

@Kato1111 This won’t help you with this lost file but I use a piece of software called AJC Active Backup. It makes backup copies whenever a file is saved, so you always have a recent copy of a file. Best to use a different drive for the backups.

M

MickRose

Participant

There is a Windows software program called Listary which is also pretty good at finding files. Good luck.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

The more I read about this thread, the more I wonder about hard drive failure. In the past, I noticed laggy behavior and files missing as hard drives approached failure. What do you know about the hard drive and its age and health?

Mike Witherell

K

Kato1111Author

Known Participant

The drive is 3 years old, I have never had any other problems, it seems stable. The strangest thing is that I was working on the file every day, with no problems, so to suddenly revert to one several days previously is most odd. I am honestly baffled.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

I’m baffled, too! Did you do actual hard drive health tests?

1. Quick Check WMIC (S.M.A.R.T. Check)

What it does: Checks if the drive's self-monitoring (S.M.A.R.T.) system detects imminent failure.
How to: Open Command Prompt as Administrator, type wmic diskdrive get model,status, and press Enter.
Results: "OK" means healthy, "Pred Fail" means the drive is failing.

2. Detailed: CHKDSK

What it does: Scans for file system corruption and bad sectors.
How to: Open Command Prompt as Admin, type chkdsk C: /f /r /x (replace C: with your drive letter), and press Enter.
Note: This may require a restart to run and can take several hours, especially if it finds errors.

Mike Witherell

leo.r

Community Expert

Yesterday, the only file available to me was dated 15 March and was not the final file I had saved. How is this possible? I have searched high and low

Just to make sure:

Does it mean that the InDesign file in its expected location was dated March 15?

OR that you couldn’t find the InDesign file in its original location but did have it in another location where it was dated March 15?

K

Kato1111Author

Known Participant

The InDesign file in the expected location was dated 15th March, but last date I worked on it was 18th March - I have a PDF and Epub created on 18th March as the book was finished, so it went for final proofing. So ALL the work I did between those dates was lost and needs to be redone, and the proofing redone too. It’s nowhere on my pc, and not saved to Adobe cloud (by mistake, I was hoping that I had done that, but nope.) I had saved and opened it several times since 15th March, I’d been working on it for three days. I’m at a loss to know how that could happen.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Sounds like you use Windows. Have you opened File Explorer and actually run a search on the entire computer for the filename?

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

Hi Kato,

I use an app called Everything when I’m trying to find a file that gets lost (either to my memory or I accidentally saved it in the wrong folder).

Whenever I export a PDF, I habitually have the switch on for View After Exporting after making it. Now that tells me the export succeeded. I can see the resulting file open in Acrobat.

If you find the likely file, what is the Modification Date saying?

Are you exporting to a folder that gets synced to OneDrive? If so, have you applied the Windows Updates dated from February and on? That has been a problem for many since December-2025-ish on until patches from Microsoft came out in February 2026.

Which fonts are changing?

Mike Witherell

K

Kato1111Author

Known Participant

I’ve never heard of that app, but I’ll investigate! Thanks for the tip.

I wondered if I had saved it to the wrong folder, but I’ve searched my whole hard drive, and neither file is there. It’s so strange because I had the files open on each day after 15th, so they would have been saved after each session, so the file existed on the 16th and 17th with my work as I was progressing through it, but now it’s just all gone.

I don’t use OneDrive, so it’s not a syncing issue - I heard about the problems with OneDrive deleting files randomly. I’d saved a complete copy of the folder with all the files I was using in Google Drive, but that also contained the ‘old’ file when I went to check.

Gremlins somewhere in the machine.

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