Can I Open an InDesign Lock (IDLK) File?
ZD wrote:
Can I open an InDesign lock file? How?
This is a great idea for one of our podcast’s obscure feature of the weeek-eek-eek, but I’m just going to dive in and answer it here for all our readers. Whenever you open an InDesign file, the program creates a “lock” file — with an “.idlk” file name extension — in the same folder.
idlk1
When I started using InDesign, I tried everything to open this file, assuming that there must be some kind of magic in there. After all, some programs do store recovery data in temporary files such as this, in case you crash.
However, if you check, you’ll probably find that this file is always zero K large. Nothign is stored in there (at least nothing that I know of). When I asked an Adobe engineer about it, he told me that the IDLK file is used simply as a marker to indicate that the file is open.
Why would such a thing be necessary? Because InDesign files are actually databases of information, and like other databases, more than one user can open them at the same time. Adobe realized that this could cause some, um, challenges, especially if two people were trying to make changes to the same file. The solution: Create a little file that alerts InDesign that the file is open and others shouldn’t change it. When you close the file, the lock file goes away.
If InDesign crashes, it does attempt to recover the work you did, but it uses Recovery Data files in your preferences folder. You may find idlk files in directories even when InDesign isn’t running; that typically indicates that you had crashed at some point and the idlk file was never deleted. Feel free to delete them yourself at that point.
I think he was referring to opening an actual locked InDesign file, not he idlk file itself… if you want to open an InDesign file that someone else has opened, all you need to do is option drag to copy the opened file.
Ha! Perhaps I did misunderstand. Interesting. But at least it led to a (I hope) interesting post.
For more on opening locked InDesign files, such as templates, see this post.
Interesting, non the less. I had once assumed it was a ‘mini-save’ until I poked around at it one day and found it to contain nothing. It seems like there should be some other way to lock the file from other users when opened as other documents are.
Why does the file need to be visible?
Hm. Well, umm… Yes, I guess it could be invisible. But in some cases, when the IDLK doesn’t get deleted, it’s useful to be able to see it and delete it manually. Otherwise you may not be able to open the InDesign file for editing.
A few people I’ve talked to lately have thought that this was an autosave, or some kind of backup for their file, and they were quite disappointed to find that when they closed their document the file disappeared, especially when InD crashed and the file wouldn’t open. I told them about where InDesign automaticaly saves temp files to the hard drive under Edit>Preferences>File Handling, to get the location on their machine, but they still don’t believe me.
Eugene, you’re right that InDesign does save recovery information to that file (and you can set where it saves it in that preference pane… just hover the cursor over the path to see the entire thing).
However, I don’t think you can really do anything with those files. It’s not the same as an Auto Save or Auto Backup (like QX has).
It’s a shame really, because I hear a lot of people’s files that they cannot open anymore and they have to redo them… it would be nice to have the auto backup that Quark has, that’s what I must have been thinking of. I knew I had used an auto backup somewhere before. That must be it.
If you’re doing any kind of computing work that entails incremental saves (really, anything from word processing to graphic design), you owe it to your sanity to have some sort of undelete software that saves various old versions in the background as the software overwrites the original file. E.g., Norton UnErase or Executive Software’s Undelete. A major lifesaver.
Or just be very vigilant to save versions while you go - too many all nighters with QXP4 taught me that - nothing is more educational than having to remake the last 2 hours work after midnight
What does one do if the IDLK files do not “auto-delete” once the INDD file is closed? I have several jobs with layouts done in ID and everytime you go back into them, minutes, hours, days or weeks later, the IDLK files are still there.
Does this mean that once I install CS3 on the next mac on our network that there will be problems with a second user opening them? I would assume that even though the INDD file is closed if the IDLK file is still there, then it is telling another user the file is still open and you can’t open it? That would be a real problem.
Help! How do I get ID to auto-delete these files as it’s supposed to?
Anne, that sounds bad and very weird. I wonder if there’s some permissions problem on the machine. Haven’t seen that problem.
Anne said: “Help! How do I get ID to auto-delete these files as it’s supposed to?”
I’ve been experiencing the same thing from time to time, but the non-auto-deleting .idlk files correlate to the InCopy stories we use in our IDCS3 spreads.
Best solution is to delete the .idlk files (if visible–sometimes their not). I just used TinkerTool to show invisible files and deleted them that way. Not an elegant solution, but it works so far…
We have the problem, that we want to create such a file manually for some reasons.
The problem: How can we predict the idlk file name. It seems that the first part of the file name is used and then a tilde and then something, that is related to the filename in terms of hash or other algorithm.
Does anybody know the rule how the idlk files are generated?
Hey, if you just use Quark (a far far superior program) you won’t have to waste hours of your valuable time pondering this nonsense!
@Luddite: You are so funny. Thank you for sharing. If you want to argue which is the better program, it’s probably better to head over to quarkvsindesign.com.
I work for a newspaper and we are having an issue with this subject. When one of our users opens a file with his computer (and only his) it does NOT create a temp file.
Then, when he tries to save, it asks if he wants to overwrite the file he just opened on our server. This creates an issue where he opens a file (worker 1), makes changes and another person (worker 2) opens the same file he is working on and saves it; finally, he saves his file and it says do you want to overwrite and all the work from “worker 2″ is lost.
I cant figure out why his computer does this. It seems his cpu makes a copy when he opens it instead of opening the actual file.
Any help would be great.
-Jared