File has disappeared completely

[Charlotte33732859phci]

Hi, I've been working on a project for two months in InDesign, which was recently updated to InDesign 2025. 

As it has updated, it has created blank slides, but all my old files work normally. The file shows the thumbnail of my work to suggest that it is still there, however, it just opens 5 blank slides instead of a 40 page document with 28 slides filled in. 

I have uninstalled the 2024 version and tried turning off the GPU, but it isn't available on my version of InDesign. I have even exported and saved it to IDML and re-opened it as an IDML file. I then tried looking at version history and it says the original date that I created it but it says there is no other version of my work.

Is there anything else I can do as I feel as though I have done most things. Any help would be much appreciated as I have had to restart my work from scratch.

[Peter Spier]

I'm guessing you haven't been doing any backing up yourself as you progress through the project.

If the only version that you have now is missing all the finished pages I'm afraid you are probably out of luck and will have to rebuild the file from scratch. Save it using a new name for safety.

Relying on Windows Restore is at best a gamble, and at worst usually useless -- I have NEVER had a successful restore when I needed it to work. I expect if you ask any of the regular responders here they will tell you that at some time in the past they were in your position and learned the hard way the value of doing daily backups. My strategy for work in progress is to do a Save As at the end of each editing session and use a new name (I use consecuting numbering myself). Not only does this provide a backup that will hopefully save you from having to recreate more than one day's work, but it also lets you go back in time and branch off in a new direction if you have a flakey client.

In addition to these daily versions I use a automated drive-imaging program that make an image of my entire drive every night and saves it on an external hard drive. This allows me to recover from catastrophic drive failure (and I've needed that more than once in the last twenty years) in a matter of hours instead of days, and it acts as an additional place I can go to recover from a single corrupted file. I'm personally not a fan of cloud storage, but many people use it for backup and the off-site aspect is insurance against some sort of physical disaster like fire or flood.

As far as what else to try, I don't hold out much hope for it, but I would use Windows File Explorer to seacrh your computer for any sign of another copy or version of your file. It will probably be tedious, but I would search dor only part of the filename first, without the .indd extension to see what comes up. I might also do a search for *.indd which will list every InDesign Document you have saved on your drive (or smaller scope if you choose one, but a broad scope might find a file accidentally saved to the wrong folder).