Need urgent help: 'File doesn't exist'

[jenaym13761845]

Hi all,

I was working on an indesign project the other day and saved it hundreds of times, however now I am going to back to finish it as I need the finished project tomorrow but it won't let me open it. So basically what happened:

1. I finished my work that I was going to do on Thursday last week and I saved it hundreds of times because I was scared of losing it. I was using a Desktop mac and my college, not my own personal macbook pro.

2. Came back to it on Monday. When I went to open it, I couldn't find the file in my finder so I opened indesign.

3. Found the document in the start up screen.

4. Went to open it

5. Got this message "Either the file does not exist, you do not have permission, or the file may be in use by another application."

How to I get it back?? I even put it on my USB but it only copied some of the file.

I need it for my class tomorrow and fear a massive all nighter.

What happened? It is there, I can see it. Why can't I get into it? PLEASE HELP. I will be forever grateful.

Thanks, from one stressed student

[hammer0909]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it seems to me that someone deleted the file. Unless you can speak to IT and see if they have a backup, you might be out of luck. If you were logged in using your account on that computer, then all of your files should reside in the home folder of that account. Not sure if your school backs up those accounts or not. It's odd that the copy you saved to the USB drive doesn't work either though. I with I could provide more help.

[jenaym13761845]

Damn! I thought that might be the case. Looks like another long night awaits me. Thank you though for your answer.

[Abambo]

From hard experience, I know that doing the work again will be faster...

When I'm doing such important work, I save in versions, basically each time when a milestone has been accomplished, it will be a new version.

[BobLevine]

Also pays to work in either a Dropbox or OneDrive folder. Both have saved my butt on more than one occasion.

[Abambo]

Not to forget: the creative cloud.

Dropbox/OneDrive/GoogleDrive/CC have all the disadvantage, that they do not protect against human disaster...

Well, I agree, It's only partially true: at least Dropbox does offer some protection as you can recover deleted files for some time.

[BobLevine]

Well, there's no cure for stupid, either.

Dropbox and OneDrive are a pretty damn good insurance policy against losing a file completely.

[hammer0909 · Accepted solution]

Any of those options is a good idea. I like the Creative Cloud files folder for being able to show my projects to clients very easily. It's dummy-proof. But all of the storage methods mentioned, DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive are no-brainer method's of protecting against data loss.

[Derek Cross]

Just to add, when Saving (and making external copies) do a Save As and give the document an incremental version name, this will clear the crud that builds up and that can cause corruption.

[jenaym13761845]

Thanks all!