how to open crash recovery files InDesign when it fails to?

[Alastair L]

InDesign crashed when I was saving a document and quiting. (nt for the first time but I use it so irregularly these days I keep forgetting how fragile it is).

When I reopenned InDesign it didn't recover the file(s) that I had open (I'd come back from other work and mac was asleep for an hour too). I may have openned the prerelease version or updated main version to 18.2.1 in between, i didn't realise it hadn't saved until I checked.

So InDesign User guide directs me to the Library folder (although the documentation ~/Library/Cache/… folder when in fact it's ~/Library/Caches/… folder with an 's'.

Theres a recover document file saved a few minutes before INDD crashed but I don't know how to use it to recover and the USer Guide is not telling me how.

Is there in fact any way to recver this info (a few hours of very tedious work)?

I tried appending .indd to the filename and moving it to a regular folder with user RW privledges but that's no joy. Its the highlighted file in the screenshot.

 

[Peter Spier]

To the best of my knowledge there is no way for a user to open the recovery file directly.

You might try force quitting InDesign and reopening to see if it will trigger recovery, but I suspect you are out of luck.

As for your comment about fragility, I think in the 20 years I've been using InDesign I've found it to be one of the most stable applications I use (aside from pre-release versions). If you have frequent crashes you probably have some other problem, most likely a software conflict with something else you have running.

[Alastair L]

Weirdly, I think my file is fine. I thought 4 pages of new content were missing, but they were there after all!

I never used to experience InDesign crashes when I was using it day in and day out.

Back in the Quark days I worked in a ast paced ad agency for a few years and I instituted a few 'rules' that i and anybody smart followed religiously, one of them was to always hit ⌘ + "S" before ever hitting ⌘ + "P" because merely opening the network protocols in the Print dialogue was capable of crashing Quark. And we used to print all the time as part of the workflow hadning the work back to the Acounnt Execs who would fax it to their clients. So it was a good way to stay safe. I got lazy on acount of how stable InDesign used to be. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I got lazy on acount of how stable InDesign used to be.

FWIW, I can't remember the last time ID identifiably munged up a file or project, and I tend to work on large, complex books and other projects with lots of loose ends to snag.

The only three things I know of that make ID untrustworthy are:

• Using features, or using features in ways that are a known problem. (E.g., GPU acceleration on Macs seems to cause as many problems as it "helps" and should be turned off at the first sign of any display issues.)
• UI issues after some updates, which may have more to do with the timing and execution of updates than anything else. Doing a preferences reset (to clear corrupted or incompletely updated app info and user settings) almost always cures these glitches.
• Poor usage practices, both within ID, within the workstation and on poorly configured networks. Adopting 'voodoo' fixes for these is common but doesn't solve the basic problems.

[BobLevine]

There is no way to use that recovery data.