Recovering corrupt Adobe Captivate projects

Occasionally an Adobe Captivate project will become corrupt and cease to work. This can happen for a number of reasons, but one of the pre-dominant reasons is most likely that you have been working on your project from a network location. In that case you probably want to read this article – Setting up Adobe Captivate 6 for use in a corporate environment – so you can avoid this in the future.

In some cases all is not lost with a corrupt project. It may be possible to recover a working .cptx file from the cache files that Adobe Captivate creates automatically. The process is relatively straight-forward and only require two things:

1) That you have saved / published your project at least once before.

2) That you haven’t deleted the Adobe Captivate cache folder.

Number 2 is of course the most critical one. In many cases where something goes wrong you will get the advice to “Clear the cache and preference files” and try to open the project again. This may very well work in some cases, but if it doesn’t work then you have just deleted your only chance to recreate your project.

Therefore.. If you have a project that has become corrupted for some reason, make sure that you make a copy of your cache files to some other location before deleting them and the project cache.

Project Cache files were implemented in Adobe Captivate 5 so the below process will work for Adobe Captivate 5, Adobe Captivate 5.5 and Adobe Captivate 6, Adobe Captivate 7 and Adobe Captivate 8.

Recovering a corrupt Adobe Captivate 5 – 7 Project from your cache files:

1. Locate the relevant cache folder for your project. This can be done by looking at the date / time of the folder creation or by downloading the “dcache” Adobe Air Application. If you use the “dcache” app you can double-click on a project name and you will see the cache folder name for that project.

2. In the cache folder open the “db” sub-folder.

3. In the “db” folder there should be a number of files and folders. Select the below mentioned folders and files and create a ZIP archive containing these.

• <compressed_data>
• <objects>
• <uncompressed_data>
• audio.cpad
• info.cpi
• text.cptd
• thumbnails.cpth

All other files / folders can be ignored and should not be included in the ZIP file.

4. Rename the file you created from .zip to .cptx.

5. Open the file in Adobe Captivate and see if it works.

Recovering a corrupt Adobe Captivate 8 Project from your cache files:

1. Locate the relevant cache folder for your project. This can be done by looking at the date / time of the folder creation. Adobe Captivate 8 generates LOADS of cache folders for each project. In Adobe Captivate 5-7 you would have one single cache folder for each project, but in Adobe Captivate 8 it generates 5 cache folders every single time you open/close/save your project so you can easily end up with 20-50 separate cache folders for a single project. In order to find the correct folder to use, you need to check the size of each folder. Chances are that all folders are 92.4 KB large expect the “real” cache folder, which will be much larger. This is the folder you are looking for.

2. In the largest cache folder open the “db” sub-folder.

3. In the “db” folder there should be a number of files and folders. Select the below mentioned folders and files and create a ZIP archive containing these.

• <compressed_data>
• <objects>
• <uncompressed_data>
• audio.cpad
• info.cpi
• text.cptd
• thumbnails.cpth
• previewThumbnail.cpth (only in CP8)

All other files / folders can be ignored and should not be included in the ZIP file.

4. Rename the file you created from .zip to .cptx.

5. Open the file in Adobe Captivate and see if it works.

The above process will in many cases allow you to recreate a working .cptx file based on your cache files and save your hours of work.