HomeSoftware TitlesAdobe InDesignInDesign crashes upon launch while attempting to recover a damaged document

17.1. InDesign crashes upon launch while attempting to recover a damaged document

Issue

InDesign continues to crash each time you try to re-start.

Reason

Documents can become damaged while working on them in InDesign, or they can contain damaged information, for example, due to hard drive or other disk read/write errors. The situation can occur when InDesign opens the file initially, but then cause a crash because InDesign tries to read or write from or to a damaged portion of the file.

The InDesign document recovery feature tries to automatically open InDesign documents which were open during the time of an application crash. If the document it is trying to open is damaged, then it can cause InDesign to crash each time you restart InDesign.

Solution

Remove the file or files from the document recovery folder.

Move these files to your desktop, and attempt to recover them using the methods described in, "Troubleshoot damaged InDesign documents" (TechNote kb403982).

You can change the document recovery folder in the user preferences. The default path is listed below, but check the location in Preferences > File Handling > Document Recovery Data to be certain.

  • On Mac OS:

    /[Hard Drive]/Users/[User Name]/Library/Caches/Adobe InDesign/Version [#.0]/InDesign Recovery
  • On Windows XP:

    C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\InDesign\Version [#.0]\en_US\Caches\InDesign Recovery
  • On Windows Vista and Windows 7:

    C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Adobe\InDesign\Version [#.0]\en_US\Caches\InDesign Recovery

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