Participating Frequently

Question

Saved working file erases three days of work, on indesign and on lacee

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
March 21, 2025
2 replies
878 views

I have been working on my indesign file every day and regularly save this. Every night I copy the saved file onto my hard drive/ lacee, to have this backed up. I woke up this morning, 20th March, to seeing three days worth of work erased, and for the file on my hard drive to say that it was last modified on the 17th March. Is my work safe? How do I restore this work or have I lost it?

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@Georgina_Zilvetti0715

Do you perform Save, then copy your file to an external drive - or do you do Save As with a new name - then copy this new file to an external drive and next day - work on the local copy of this new file?

G

Georgina_Zilvetti0715Author

Participating Frequently

I Save, check that it has saved my work before dragging this file to my hard drive/ Lacee. Usually, the next day when I go back to work on it, it has been saved and updated. I have been doing this method for all my hand ins and I find it odd how this has happened.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@Georgina_Zilvetti0715

And that's might be the reason why it finally failed 😞

When you do Save - InDesign is preserving Undo History - that is no longer accessible after you close your file - but is still part of the file.

When you open your file again - InDesign have to analyse all this information - every change you've made - to "build" finall version of your file - this takes time and can lead to corruption - and your file very large and slow.

Try to open - just for test - then do Save As with a new name - and check the size difference - on your drive.

Save As with a new name - never overwrite your original / open file - is a "housekeeping" - gets rid of all Undo History and reorganises your document.

There is no point doing it all the time - but at the end of the day - would be beneficial. And you get extra backup copy.

Of course, next day, you need to work on this new file.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

I hate to say this, but it sounds like user error. While an OS glitch might conceivably erase a file, I don't believe there is any way InDesign can do it. Perhaps you save in a different folder? Maybe did a Save AS with a new name the last time (which , by the way, is a really good practice to keep versioned backups in case something goes wrong and you need to recover an earlier version).

Some additional information about your OS and InDesign versions would help.

G

Georgina_Zilvetti0715Author

Participating Frequently

My macOS is 15.1.1 and the InDesign version I had been working on is 2024. I have tried to locate this file on my laptop by searching the name on finder, but have had no luck- would you suggest any other ways of locating this?

This is an examination piece for my uni hence the concern. Thank you for suggesting to Save As instead.

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

I recommend to work on a clour drive like Dropbox. They include tools to restore deleted or overwritten files easy.

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