InDesign - need a "Fix my Corrupted File" Upload Service

Question

There are frequently posts on the forum for people who have corrupted INDD files. This means lost work and frustrated InDesign users.
The Indesign team should offer a "Fix my File" upload link to its customers.
For each corrupted file, you will help a customer, and in the process, hopefully improve the overall stability of the product (which has issues) and benefit everyone...
Adobe: If you are afraid that you will be swamped with requests to "Fix my File", then you should probably just get out of the SW business now...

Answer 1

Zak Williamson wrote: "If the documents are fundamentally corrupt in some way, theres no way to repair them." and then later "As I mentioned to Casey, it's rarely possible to repair a truly corrupt document"
I definitely don't want this to sound like a flame or a whine, but I find that statement quite flabbergasting. Somebody at Adobe must understand the format of an InDesign file well enough to be able to edit out the specific element that is causing InDesign to complain about the document. I do file repair for another company (www.qsatoolworks.com) whose file format is probably more complex than an InDesign file. In over 10 years I've only had 1 or 2 files I could not repair at least to the point of recovering the textual data.
What led me to this forum is that a customer contacted me to help them recover an InDesign file. They just migrated from a PowerMac G4 with CS2 to a Mac Pro with CS3 and a few of their files won't open. ("ID may not support the file format, a plug-in that supports the file format may be missing, or the file may be open in another application.")
We have tried them on another Mac with CS2, and they won't open there either. "Something" must have gone wrong when the files were transferred to the new Mac.
(Naturally, the old hard drive has already been reformatted.)
Knowing what I do about file formats (but understanding that my knowledge is nearly worthless in an InDesign file) I have to assume an InDesign file contains an object map with pointers to the various objects in the document. The idea of telling the customer "your 32 page booklet is lost" when the problem could simply be a screwed up pointer is horrifying to me.
Here at QSA ToolWorks we charge $120/hour for recovery service, success or failure. We've saved lots of people from their own recklessness, and created a passionate user base in the process. We've made our product more reliable (and fixed some bugs) based on the knowledge gained through file repair; Adobe could do the same, but if they don't want to provide such a service, perhaps they should consider training third parties to do it.
I'd like to address one other comment above. Harbs wrote "I've been lead to believe that Adobe has utilities (which they use internally) to analyze and possibly fix corrupted files." Of course, I don't know whether Adobe has such utilities, but I suspect they don't. Because I can do Helix database repairs, people likewise assume I have "special utilities" that can fix corrupted files. (We've even been accused of keeping them secret so we can use file repair as a source of revenue!) I don't. What I do have is a deep understanding of the file format. Beyond that, a file editor and a couple of AppleScripts I wrote to display the object fields in a human-readable format are all the 'special' tools I have. If Adobe has any sort of tools for analyzing files, I suspect they are much the same. In other words, without extensive internal knowledge, they are worthless.