Indesign crashes when opening file

[Oliver.b]

Absolute state here, im a final year student and the indesign file containing my project is causing me major problems. 

When i try to open the file one of twop things will happen.

A. i will be shown the indesign loading screen and then the program will just dissapear

B. i will be show this message 

if i click yes the program will just close ... 

In file explorer, the file is showing 1.2gb still (this is about right) is there any hope of getting this file open and if so how... 

Already tried making copies and re naming the file this was unsuccesful. 

Help...

[Peter Spier]

1.2 GB is an extremely HUGE size for an InDesign file. Did you mean 1.2 MB?

This file seems to be damaged, or if it's actually 1.2 GB it may be that it's just more than the program can handle on your system.

It will help to know what version of InDesign and OS, but from your mention of File explorer I'm guessing some version of Windows, so you can try downloading the recovery tool from INDDRecovery — a program for restoring corrupted InDesign documents  and run it on a copy of the file.

You can also try making a copy of the file on the desktop and see if it will open from there.

[Peter Spier]

And if you are successful in recovering anything, you should export that to .idml, open that and save with a new name as .indd.

1.2 GB sounds like you may have a lot of pasted or embedded graphic content. This is a problem waiting to happen (ans you 've discovered). Much better to Place this sort of content and maintain a link to it.

Do you have any back-up copies of previous versions? You may have just learned another valuable lesson...