Almost every application used in production is set to automatically update itself through the Internet. The decision to update is purely based on the fact that we are told that it is available, but this is not always the best policy.
The operating system of a Mac is, by default, set to announce new updates for everything in the system. It lists updates to certain programs, firmware or the core system usually with an explanation that it is a “Security Update.” These do update the security of your software, but at the same time could cause unforeseen problems.
For system updates, the best recommendation is to have a full disk image of your existing system created before running the update. Using Apple’s Disk Utility or a third-party software like SuperDuper to create a bootable image of your system, you have the ability to return to the previous system if the update causes problems.
Creative Suite has a bouncing icon that shows up monthly or weekly to update a long list of items on your system. You may think that you should update everything to the newest level, but what can happen is you end up with files you cannot open, or all of a sudden, you cannot export a PDF file anymore. Of course, the above advice for a bootable system backup applies here as well, but here are some ideas to save your files and get you back to work:
If you have updated several programs with the Adobe Updater and you now cannot export a PDF file from InDesign, an Acrobat Professional update could have been the culprit. Open the Acrobat preferences and select convert to PDF. A list of program will open; choose InDesign. Standard will probably be the selection in the pop-up window and you should change it to a different profile that you use in InDesign.
Another Acrobat update rendered the ability to create a preflight droplet useless. It was not fixed until the next update months later and left me looking through backups to find droplets that had not been corrupted.
The worst thing that can happen after an update is that an existing project crashes or freezes in the new version. There are a few ways to troubleshoot the program and the file. The first step is resetting InDesign’s preferences. InDesign stores information about plug-ins and settings in this file so you may have to go through them again. To reset the preference file, quit InDesign, relaunch the program and immediately hold down the Ctrl, Option, Command and Shift keys. InDesign will ask you if you want to recreate the preference file; click yes.
If a specific file is still having problems with freezing or crashing, you can repair it by exporting it to an INX (Interchange) format. This rewrites the file and can clean up the problem. Still no luck? You can resort to dragging the page into a new document. Open your document as well as a new document and select Window->Tile. Activate the original document and open the Pages Window. Drag pages or spreads to the new document and save. This will leave any structural or internal problems behind when you save the document. The structure of the document will be new and should solve the issue.
Other Creative Suite programs have had update glitches. The Camera Raw update for Photoshop caused users to lose the use of their guides. After searching the Internet, the solution was a preference to use Camera Raw by default.
Turning this preference off restored the guides.
The best policy for updating production Macs is to proceed only when there is a full, recent backup of the system that can be restored in case of disaster. You don’t have to update your system just because the update is available; you can wait for a project to be finished so as not to lose production time.
Both the Mac system and Creative Suites are interconnected and one problem solved can create another problem you didn’t expect. Often, it will be months for the next update to solve the issue so it is best to play it safe and backup first.
