Help please! ID5 doc fine 2 days ago, crashes on open cant recover - Any ideas?

Question

Hi All
I have a 14 page brochure that me and a couple others have been working on continuosly for a few weeks. Everything was fine when I quit out of it last 2 days ago, then last night when I tried to open it, ID crashed, on restating ID it said do you want to start automatic recovery, i clicked yes, it then crashed again and I am then stuck in a ontinual loop, untill I say leave til later.
I have tried the back up and get the same result, as it obbacked up the corrupt one.
I have tried on a different mac
I have tried dumping the plist file com.adobe.InDesign.plist
I have tried starting up holding command alt sontrol shift
I am having no luck!
PLease can someone help me???

Answer 1

Are you getting any error messages? Was it saved to your local hard drive, or a network location? You say the backup is also corrupted. Do you have more than one version of the file backed up? Does it help If you move everything out of the Recovery folder and try to open the backup copy?
The odds are pretty good at this point that ID alone cannot recover the file. Markzware has a service for attempting to recover bad files using their Quark<>ID translation tools that is often successful, though. Fix Your Bad InDesign Files!
You might want to try copying the file to your local drive if it's on a network, and try opening as a copy. You might get lucky. If you are able to open the file, export to .idml immediately, then save the old file with a new name, close it for backup, and open the .idml and save that with yet another new name and work from that.
I don't mean to pour salt on the wounds, here, but backup, and retaining multiple backup versions, is an important part of a professional workflow (and is valuable for amateurs, too), and yet few useers seem to understand that until after a disaster strikes and it's too late. Dedicated automatic imaging/backup software and external drives are very inexpensive compared to the cost of recovering two weeks of work, and redundancy (saving at least three old versions) can save you at least part of the rebuild if you back up a corrupt file.
Opening and saving files across a network connection is also more risky than working from your local hard drive (though nothing is without risk). Most of the time you won't have a problem, but networks have data collisions and drops all the time which can result in minor damage or total loss. I would say that more than 90% of reports of files that will no longer open are for files saved on a network share.