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AlistairDiamond
AlistairDiamond
Participant
October 22, 2017
Question

InDesign using 15 Gig of free space then crashing

  • October 22, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1587 views

Hi all

I have a job for a client making a magazine book annual out of 6 48-page PDF magazines. I have used PDF2ID to turn all of the magazines into InDesign files. I now wish to make one master document and move all the TOC pages to the front of that, deleting those pages from the original files as they are moved, then creating a book file with all of the now 7 InDesign documents which can be exported as one long PDF.

The InDesign files created by PDF2ID are all large - around 125 meg each.

The trouble is that every time I have the master document and one of the others open, and try to do a simple operation - like moving two pages from one to the other - the program uses up all of my remaining disk space, says it can no longer operate and crashes.

My PC C Drive is very full, so I deleted 15 Gig of unnecessary files, and Windows said there was 15 Gig available. I then fired up InDesign and opened two documents, attempting to move 2 pages. The same thing happened, Indesign crashed, saying there was not enough space for its temporary databases. Now Windows says that I have 5 meg available on my drive, and warns me with it's speech bubble that I am running very low on space.

What's going on please? Where are all these temporary database files, seemingly 15 Gig of them? How can I delete them? How can I stop this happening again?

Disk cleanup says I can free 7 meg of space, so that's no use.

I have InDesign 5.5.

Thanks in advance for your time!

Alistair

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    Willi Adelberger
    Community Expert
    Willi AdelbergerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    October 26, 2017

    Don't embed images, replace the images with linked files.

    Don't put all pages into a single document. Work with INDB instead.

    C
    Cari Jansen
    Legend
    October 26, 2017
    • Try opening the INDD file and File > Export, and choose InDesign IDML as the format, then reopen that IDML file in InDesign to see if it reduces the file size that is generated by running it through PDF2ID.
    • Also I'm wondering if the images are all Embedded as part of PDF2ID (I've not used the plug-in so not sure if that's how it works, but you can check this in the Links panel).  If embedded, are you able to extract the images from the PDF and re-import (File > Place) these in the InDesign file? Embedding images will seriously bloat the file size in InDesign and isn't recommended.
    • Also have you tried running disk defragmentation on Windows? (refer to support.microsoft.com on how to do this).
    AlistairDiamond
    AlistairDiamondAuthor
    Participant
    October 29, 2017

    Thanks for your reply.I used CCleaner which found 26 Gig of temporary files and deleted them. But it didn't tell me where they were. My question is all about what's happening to create those enormous temp files. My InDesign file doesn't have embedded images. The disk doesn't need defragging. InDesign is doing something strange and unwanted and I'm trying to find out what that is.

    T
    Tiger26445129idx8
    Participant
    October 5, 2022

    Hi I know I probably won't get a reply as this was years ago but I am having the same problem of when I export my 20gb of free disk space is being used up and when the export is almost finished the disk space is gone and it fails?

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