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Recovering
From And Preventing Data Loss In Quark™ |
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Sometimes you may encounter errors while working in QuarkXPress™.
The program will crash or worse, you may see a message that
the file you were working on is not a QuarkXPress document
and you won't be able to open it at all. You don't want this
to happen to you at the midnight hour of a deadline on a file
you've spent a a hundred hours creating. There are a few simple
steps you can take to prevent this and if it does happen,
if you have taken precautions ahead of time, you can recover
all or most of your data.
Enable Auto Backups
Since version 3.3, QuarkXPress has had an auto backup feature.
I recommend you use it (more
here). It will save the most recent 5 backups by default,
but this number can be changed. Every time you save your work,
it generates a new backup copy.
Save Often
Backups won't do you any good unless you save them. Get into
the habit of saving your work often. Use Ctrl-S (Windows®) or
Command-S (Mac®) which is the keyboard shortcut for File
> Save. The rule of thumb is to save whatever you
are not willing to lose.
Make Laser Printouts
Another simple step is to make laser proofs of your work. This
is for a last-ditch effort at recreating your file if all else
fails.
Data Recovery - Step By Step
If you need to recover from a corrupted file there are two scenarios.
One, you can open the file and two, you can't. If you can't
open the file, use your most recent backup and recreate your
work from there. If you can open the file, there are a couple
of possibilities:
a.) The Quark™ document is okay and you have a corrupted
image
b.) There is something wrong with the Quark™ document
file
Corrupted Image
For corrupted images, the first and most simple step is to re-import
all the images. This can be done with a single click. Close
the file, then reopen it with Ctrl-Open (Windows) or Command-Open
(Mac). Sometimes an image preview may get corrupted. This step
regenerates all the previews at once.
If this doesn't work, one or more source images may be corrupt.
Sometimes Quark will crash while paging through a document.
Watch the screen redraws and try to spot the bad page. While
the screen is redrawing you will often spot the image where
the program crashes. If you spot the bad image try deleting
the contents of the picture box with the Content tool. You can
also try deleting the bad page itself, then save the file as
a new document. If this works, you may have one or more bad
images on the page. If you find a bad image, then open it in
your image editor and create a new blank image (don't
copy it from the clipboard yet). Once you have created and saved
the new blank image, then copy the pixels using the clipboard.
If this doesn't work, try saving the image in a new format.
Try TIFF, PCX, BMP or anything just to test the image. Use this
process to create and import a new image, then rebuild your
page.
Corrupted QuarkXPress Document File
If the problem is not a corrupted image, but you can still open
the document file, then create a new blank Quark document using
File > New. Setup the file with the same
page size, margins, column guides and whether or not it uses
facing pages.
1. Next, open the bad document file and click View >
Thumbnails for both files. Next click Window
> Tile Vertically so you can drag and drop the pages
from the bad document to the good one.
2. Highlight all the pages in the bad document, then drag and
drop them onto the new document underneath the default
page.
3. Your screen should look something like the one below. This
will import the contents of the bad document into a fresh QuarkXPress
document. Save the new file and delete the top page. This step
will often be all you need to do to recover your data.
Test Your Backups
There is no substitute for backing up your files. If you
don't there may be no other way to recover your data. Test
your backups as well to make sure they open. Once I almost
lost a quarter of a catalog. I was running QuarkXPress 3.32
on Windows 95 (a 32-bit system) and was using a 16-bit image
editor at the time (Aldus Photostyler 2.0). If I ran the image
editor while multitasking QuarkXPress, there was no problem
as long as the Quark file was open. But as soon as I closed
the file, it would not reopen. I checked the most recent backup
and it wouldn't open either. I was lucky and the oldest backup
opened. I came very close to losing the lot.
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