How to Recover an InDesign File on Mac after Crashed, Unsaved, Deleted or Lost

Updated to Home > HowTos > File Recovery Tips on Mac by Robert on Mar 25, 2024 | Approved by Daryl Baxter

There are many reasons for the loss of Adobe InDesign files. Recently, similar problems have appeared a lot. Especially for Mac users. For most people, it’s a happy experience to update macOS to 10.14.1, Mojave. However, it is a disaster for InDesign/InCopy CC 2018 users. After update to Mojave, it seems InDesign doesn’t work as swiftly as it used to be. It lags more than 15 seconds to load a file. And what worse, it crashed when you try to do any action on it. And the worst, you might not save the file while it crashed without saving the changes. From the Adobe forum, it is said this bug is at Apple’s end and they will fix it in the 10.14.2. If your InDesign file is lost due to an unexpected error. You are lucky enough, here you can use automatic recovery feature to recover unsaved InDesign files on Mac or recover InDesign file on Mac by a tool, whether it is deleted, formatted driver or emptied trash, etc.

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Methos #1. Try Adobe InDesign Automatic Recovery to Recover Unsaved InDesign File on Mac
Methos #2. Recover InDesign Files on Mac after Deleting, Formatting or Lost

Methos #1. Try Adobe InDesign Automatic Recovery to Recover Unsaved InDesign File on Mac

Whenever you make a change to an InDesign document, it will save the changes every minute. It stored the changes in temporary files. All the temporary files are saved in the InDesign Recovery folder. By default, they’re in the directly ~/Library/Cache/Adobe InDesign/Version[#.0]/InDesign Recovery. If InDesign shuts down on Mac unexpectedly or macOS crashed and you have to shut it down, you can try the temporary files to recover unsaved InDesign file on Mac. Here are the simple steps:

Step 1. Restart InDesign on Mac. It will check the InDesign Recovery Folder for the documents that were open when it shut down, trying to open the documents and incorporate any mini-save data into them.

Step 2. When it finds the documents and successfully incorporates mini-saved data into the documents, the file name will come with [filename]Recovered. From there, you have 2 options.

Methos #2. Recover InDesign Files on Mac after Deleting, Formatting or Lost

If you lose Adobe InDesign files due to wrong operation or other unknown reasons, you can free try a professional InDesign recovery Mac tool - iBeesoft Data Recovery to recover the unsaved, missing or deleted InDesign files on Mac. It is designed for users to scan Mac, retrieving deleted or lost photoshop files, documents, videos, audio files, pictures, etc. Here are the simple steps for how to use the InDesign document recovery Mac tool to recover an lost/deleted InDesign file on Mac.

Your Effective InDesign File Recovery Mac Software

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  • Efficiently recover InDesign file on Mac under various data loss situations, like deleted, emptied the trash, formatted drive, OS upgrade, OS reinstallation, etc.
  • It can easily and quickly to do InDesign recovery from Mac disk/volume, SD card, USB drive, and other external devices.
  • It provides two recovery modes to ensure recover InDesign file in the Mojave and latest OS you’ve lost or deleted.
Download for macOS Download for Windows

Simple Steps to Recover Indesign File on Mac

Step 1. Click the download button to get the free trial version of InDesign document recovery Mac software. Install it on your Mac like you install the other software. It can completely recover deleted files on Mac and other drives within 3 simple steps.

Step 2. Launch the recover Indesign file Mac program. From the first window, you can see all supported file types are selected. You can check out the files belong to which type from the tech spec page and only keep the file type selected, unchecking other types. It will save your time to scan for the lost or deleted InDesign documents. Click "Start" to recover InDesign files on Mac.

Step 3. In the next window, select the hard drive/volume where once your InDesign documents saved. After then, click "Scan" to let the software looking for the missing or deleted InDesign files for you.

Step 4. It might take longer if you have multiple InDesign files lost or deleted before it finishes the scanning process. When it finished, you can preview the found files before you recover Indesign file. When finding the target InDesign document you want to recover, select it and click "Recover" to save on your Mac.

As you see, there is a "Deep Scan" option in the result window. It is another option for you to scan deeper for the lost InDesign documents. You can try it as well. The only drawback is that it takes longer for the scanning process.