Large File Won’t Open

[Baroque25]

I made the mistake of embedding about a hundred images, which ballooned the file to 10GB. Now the file fails to open; it just quits trying halfway through loading, not even crashing the program. Is there a way to unembed images without asking the program to open the file? Any other fixes?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Is the file on the fastest local drive you have? 10GB shouldn't be a problem but if it's on a cloud folder or even a slow external or network drive it could be a problem.

Unfortunately, there are not many ways to fix a file if it can't be opened.

[Mike Witherell]

How much RAM you got?

[BobLevine]

10GB? My guess is that file is corrupt and I doubt there's much that you can do to save it. Were you working in a Dropbox or OneDrive folder by any chance? There are limits to file sizes there but you could try to restore earlier versions if you were.

Otherwise, I'm afraid I have nothing else to offer.

[rob day]

Hi @Baroque25 , Also, how much available space is there on your startup drive? InDesign would use the startup drive as a scratch disk if RAM is limited.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Baroque25 

Try this:

http://kasyan.ho.ua/indesign/all/blind_open_and_idml-export.html

Or this if above fails:

http://kasyan.ho.ua/indesign/all/indd_recovery.html

[Joel Cherney]

I don't know if it will work for you or not, but in very similar circumstances, I used Martin Fisher's script to blind-export an IDML from an oversized InDesign file that wouldn't open due to problems with embedded images. That might work for you, if your 10gb file size is actually due to some sort of file corruption. 

If you've legitimately embedded ten gigs of images in your INDD, then a successful IDML export will still contain all of that embedded image data, and the resulting IDML might still be unopenable. If that's the case, assuming a successful IDML export, you could edit the IDML directly with a text editor and remove the image data. That's rather more complicated, but it's doable. Jongware's (RIP) answer to this StackExchange question might be enough to get you started, assuming you already know how to unzip an IDML and dig around. 

There's also Markzware's paid file recovery service, which I've not used myself, but at least some of the people that I've referred to them over the years have reported back that their files were successfully rescued. 

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Baroque25 

Can you ZIP - or better yet RAR - your file and share it?

Can be on priv of course - click my name.

Please split into pieces for convenience - 250MB/500MB.