Corrupted file???

[clwork]

My latest edition of my Adobe Captivate 8 file will not open the latest file.. I have moved it several times from my desktop to our server. I thought I should leave it on the desktop. After working with the Text to Speech tool and importing music files I started having the problem. It will NOT open in Captivate 8.

I suppose the file is corrupt. Has anyone here resolved this issue?

[Lilybiri]

Do you have the backup file (at least if backup is turned on in Preferences)?

Do not clear the cache, may be the last solution to recover an older version.

[BDuckWorks]

There is another thread that discussed recovering lost work from the Captivate cache files:

Re: How do you recover a project from Cache files in CP8

Keep in mind that Captivate can frequently and consistency have trouble with files that have been moved across the network.

Your working files should always be stored on a local drive on your computer, it does not have to be the boot drive with the computer's operating system; but you should never open Captivate files for editing from a network location, like a shared drive.

This is a serious limitation in today's corporate IT environment, as most IT organizations are now useing shared drives as networked storage for their user files.

Best practice would be to use a local file system for the cptx file, with backups turned on in Cp preferences.

To begin your day:

Use 'Save as' to make a new project file for that days work, and save it to the local file system.

At the end of the day:

Copy the files to a network drive as your offline backup.

You may wish to verify the size of the files in your os, or run a file copy program that will verify size and continuity of the files transferred.

At the end of the week:

After the daily archive, move local copies to the trash but do not empty.

At the end of the month:

After daily and weekly processes, verify that the network copies are usable.

Copy a few back to local storage, open and verify they'll publish a working course. You may need to test in your LMS or SCORM Cloud.

Once you're confident that the networked files are suitable as a backup, then empty trash and (on windows) run disk cleanup to recover space.

You may also consider archiving projects to CD/DVD/Blue Ray media that don't need to be stored on the network any longer, but beware that removable media has an expected life of 10 - 12 years, and is not permanent storage.

[clwork]

BDuckWorks thank you for this information.

[oleb68801795]

If you can locate and remove the corrupting elements, you can usually restore your project to full functionality.  If fortune smiles and you can still open and navigate the project, try using a process of elimination to locate the offending slide or object and remove it. 

Here’s how:

1. Hide all slides in the first half of your project and try to publish again. 
2. If you still cannot publish, hide all slides in the last half of the project and try to publish. 
3. If you are able to identify the half of the project where the corruption exists, use the same slide hiding process to progressively narrow down where the problem slide is.
4. Once you identify the issue, remove the object or slide and try publishing again.

[oleb68801795]

Recover a project from cache

If you want to try and recover all changes to the current state of your project, you can try restoring from the cache.  This is a special folder where temporary working files are stored as you edit a Captivate project file. The default location is usually in My Documents > Adobe Captivate Cached Projects. 

However, the cache folder location can be changed and set to a different default location under Preferences > General Settings > Default Locations > Project Cache.
If you’ve been working on quite a few project files your cache will likely contain a large number of folders with names that consist of seemingly random letters and numbers.  These folders contain all the files necessary to recreate each separate project file you’ve worked on since the last time the cache was cleared.  The contents of the cache folder are updated each time you hit Save for that particular project.  This means, if you know what to do, you can sometimes resurrect a project file that steadfastly refuses to open via any other method.  This is great news for Captivate developers!

But it’s not all good. Since the folders all have this cryptic naming convention, it’s impossible to tell from just looking at the names which specific project each one contains. If you run into project corruption issues during a particular session, you can sort the project folders by date modified and that should shorten the odds somewhat.  The most recently modified folder is probably the one for your project.