Adobe Captivate: Understand Project Cache and Save Some Cash

When I teach my Adobe Captivate Classic classes, we cover application Preferences fairly early. If you're on a PC, choose Edit > Preferences. If you're on a Mac, choose Adobe Captivate > Preferences. From the top of the Preferences, click General Settings.

You will see two options in the Default Locations area: Publish at and Project Cache.

The Publish At option allows you to specify where your projects are published. That makes sense. The less obvious feature is the role of Project Cache. According to Adobe, the Project Cache folder contains all of your projects' components until you click the Clear Cache button. The cached assets make the process of opening, saving, and working on a project faster.

Note: In the image above, I created a folder named Cache directly on my hard drive. You can create the Cache folder anywhere you like, provided the location is not a network resource. Do not delete your Cache folder (or click the Clear Cache button in the image above) unless you have a project backup. Without the contents of the Cache folder, the steps listed below to recover a corrupt project will not work.

Should your Captivate project become corrupt or get misplaced, and you have the backup file, change the name of the backup file to new_name.cptx and you're all set. If you don't have a project backup and the only version of your project refuses to open, the cached version of the project will come to your rescue. Assuming you know the location of your project cache folder, you should be able to resurrect a project by following the steps below (the xxx in the example below will be different on your system).

Special thanks to fellow Captivate developer Rod Ward, Director of Infosemantics, who had the misfortune (or fortune, depending on how you look at the world) of working with a Captivate project that refused to open. Rod used these steps and was able to get back in the game.

1. Find the project cached folder (for example, C:\Users\your name\Documents\Adobe Captivate Cached Projects\CPDxxxxx\db).
   
   This is the default location of the cached project, and you can change this via the Global Preferences, as mentioned above.
   
   The folder will contain the following:
   
   A folder called Compressed_data. (This folder will contain several cpd files.)
   
   A folder called Objects. There should be a file within the folder called objects.cpo. The size of this file should be greater than 0 kb.
   
   A folder called uncompressed_data.
   
   A file called audio.cpad.
   
   A file called info.cpi.
   
   A file called text.cptd.
   
   A file called thumbnails.cpth.
   
   
2. Select the files named above and use them to create a zip file.
   
   Note: There may be other folders and files in the db folder mentioned above. Be careful to not include any other files in the zip other than those listed above. According to Rod, "the other files that might be there seem to be files used in locking the project so that you cannot inadvertently edit two of them at the same time."
   
   
3. Change the extension of the zip file to cptx and the file should open in Captivate.
   
   "Captivate saves one of these db folders each and every time you save a project file," said Rod. "If you don't have success with the first one you try (possibly because it is too corrupted), you can always try another one further down the list by looking at the time the folder was added."
   
   Rod went on to say: "The naming structure of the folders provides no clue as to which CP project corresponds to which cached folder. If you happen to be working on several projects simultaneously, it can take a bit of digging to find the one that you want. You have to keep creating and opening these zips until you get lucky. This, of course, is not a problem if you know the exact time when you happened to be saving a particular project."