InDesign crashes upon launch while attempting to recover a damaged document

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

Reason

Documents can become damaged while working on them in InDesign or contain damaged information due to hard drive or other disk read or write errors. The situation can occur when InDesign opens the file initially but then causes 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 that were open during an application crash. If the document it's trying to open is damaged, it can cause InDesign to crash each time you restart.

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