I have been working on a presentation in Keynote for a few weeks. Since yesterday I started seeing what seems like the backup versions of the file in the Finder window. There's 80+ files now!
How did they suddenly appear and how I can reset it so that I only see my actual file? Can I just remove them without affecting my master file? I'm ok with losing the version history.
[Edited by Moderator]
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 26.5
Far out! They look a bit like Time Machine backups, almost. The thing about Time machine backups is that they look like this:
These are automatically made by Tahoe and kept on my 2 TB internal drive. And all of them say that they are 2 TB in size. But they really don't take up much room, at all. The modern APFS (Apple File System) doesn't take up any extra space for copies-- everything is pointers. So duplicates of a file will really be only one file.
You don't show the sizes of your files, but I'm guessing that these this is the sort of thing that you're seeing, and that these don't really take up the space that it appears. The are just backups, as you say, but pretty benign.
I think that I would grab them up and put them in the Trash and see what happens. If after a while nothing seems awry, then empty the trash.
And see if new ones are being made. Interesting…
Yeah, I've deleted them and nothing seems affected.
My main issue is that suddenly my Finder window ends up with so many files. I've been working in Keynote for years and this is only the first time that is's been happening. If anyone knows how to stop this, or how it even started, that'd be great.
Other than that I will just move on...
How large are the files? What happens if you double click one?
I have a number of keynote files that I'm working on, and I don't find any of these ".key.sb…" files. Where did you see these? Are they invisible? Can you give some more information?
Well, I'm still using version 13…
I'm on Keynote 14.4.
These are not invisible files. As you can see in the attached screenshot, these seem to be the backup versions of the master file, and are all listed in the same folder as the master file.
So, they're actually folders so I can't double click them, only open them. Each backup file/folder is the same size as the keynote masterfile, which at this point is 2.8+ GB; it's a big presentation I'm working on.
So I'm having dozens of backups of roughly the same GB.
Each backup folder contains a MetaData and Data folder, the latter one containing all the images and videos that are in the presention.
Keynote backup files in Finder: How to remove?
