Advice on best practices on book proof stages

Question

I'm wondering how others go about book projects when you move from one proof to the next, in the context of using InDesign's book panel to manage your project.
I create a first proof in InDesign, send PDFs to contributors, and they approve or give me changes.
This brings me to the second proof. Those PDFs are sent to an external proofreader.
When the proofreader's comments come back, I incorporate them into the final proof, which goes to indexers.
Because of the way things can get mucked up, I need to keep the first, second and final proofs separate, so that I can go back to figure out where things went wrong, if they did go wrong. So there is an individual directory for each stage; furthermore, so that it is easy to tell what I'm looking at, the file name of each chapter reflects the stage "1_StupidBook_proof1.indd" and so on.
So what do people usually do in InDesign, in terms of the .indb file. Do you just rename all the files to "xxx_proof2" and edit the .indb file, removing the old pages and adding the new? Seems cumbersome. Rename the files and create a NEW .indb file?
Just curious about how others do it. Appreciate any input.

Answer 1

I have variables in the master page footers, one is the file name and one is the date (last changed, I think?).And one serious drawback with this method, obviously, is that I have to remove it from each chapter in the final proof.
Ah -- that wasn't obvious to me. You can have any of 3 dates as text variable, the creation date, the modificaiton date, or the output date.
One approach would be to use a custom text variable that you could syncrhronize across your book. That way you could specify "PROOF1" and then remove or change the variable across all chapters in a single operation.
So your suggestion of the page information option under crop marks is a much better idea.
I am not sure it is the way to go, though. If you print on oversize pages (e.g., if your book size is smaller than letter and you print on letter, or smaller than tabloid and you print on tabloid), it is easy enough to print at 100% and the Page Info will appear on the paper outside the area of your book.
If you don't do that (most of us don't have that luxury), then you can consider moving the page marks inside the live region of the page. Doing this requires exploiting an undocumented feature of InDesign, custom crop marks, which requires hand-editing a custom file... See http://forums.adobe.com/message/3637984#3637984, etc. for directions. Some might consider this too much of a pain...