Unlinking InCopy Stories and Archiving Publications

When you use InCopy as a part of your workflow, it adds a lot of .incx and .inca files to the collection of project files. After a publication has gone to press and you're ready to archive the files, it would be really nice to eliminate any unnecessary files if you don't need them. Minimizing the number of files and the required storage always makes a backup easier. For example, to make a backup of all the files used to create an issue of a magazine or newspaper after it's been published, you can unlink all the stories and simplify your file organization. To streamline an InDesign file, open it in InDesign, select all the InCopy stories in the Links palette, and choose the Unlink command from the palette menu. This breaks all the links to the .incx files and ensures that all the content is embedded in the InDesign file.

After you unlink all the InCopy stories, you should update all the Assignments in the Assignments palette to make sure you haven't missed anything. You know for certain that all the InCopy stories are unlinked when all the Assignments are empty and the Assignments palette lists nothing under the "Unassigned InCopy Content" listing. Now you can delete all the .incx and .inca files on your hard drive that are related to that InDesign document and back up the project in your archives.