So if I understand this correctly, y'all are accessing a physical server, but through the cloud.
Are you working from home and trying to get files from the office server? Or do you have a physical server somewhere remote where you are accessing it in your shop through the cloud? Either way, I think this may have a bunch to do with your problem.
It takes a lot of network bandwidth to work with remote InDesign files over the cloud. Exponentially more when a bunch of you are doing it at the same time. And that has the potential for introducing, to use technical terms, a lot of bad juju into the system. Your description of the files becoming increasingly more difficult to work with over time is an indication of that. Not to apologize for Adobe, but I don't think the update to 16.3 is the issue so much as you're approaching the point where you enter into a World of Hurt.
If you can pull down a packaged folder with an InDesign file and its linked graphics and fonts to your desktop, and that works well on your computer — but not through the cloud drive — we're down to two possibilities for your World of Woe. One is errant lock files, which is the most likely issue. The other is general networking/access issues, where you will need help from your IT people.
Let's deal with the one where you can help with the solution. InDesign lock files (.idlk) are created whenever you open an InDesign file. These are the files that keep other people out of your InDesign document while you work on it. That's a good thing.
Across remote resources though, your systems have problems releasing/deleting those .idlk files when closing InDesign files. Which means when you go back to those documents nobody can get back into them. Unless you remove the .idlk files from your remote resources.
Here's how you do that:
1) Everybody has to exit from InDesign. You can keep your computers on, but InDesign needs to be shut down everywhere in your workgroup. Everywhere.
2) Go to your cloud resources, and do a search for *.idlk to find every orphaned InDesign lock file you have scattered through your resources. Search the entire resources, no matter how long it takes. Don't be surprised if your resources are polluted with them.
3) Since you're all tied to those resources remotely, and every system in your group has InDesign shut down, all those files are debris. You can delete them without repercussions. Kill them all.
4) Now go back to your cloud resources and try to open one of those trouble InDesign files again.
More likely than not, this will be the end of your problems ... for a while. If it isn't, you're dealing with more difficult networking issues and will need serious IT support. But even if it does work, you want to inform your IT staff what happened and how you've fixed it in the short term. They should be able to come up with better fixes for you than I'm offering here.
This doesn't fix the problem so much as beat it into submission for a while. Without serious IT support in the near term, you're going to be back in this fight again. But hopefully this will get you well down the road to recovery. Please give this a try and let me know how it's worked for you. I won't let you die alone on this hill, I promise. We'll go down in flames together.
Hope this helps,
Randy
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