Autosave not working, and cannot Save Version in any Mac app

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Level 1

60 points

Autosave not working, and cannot Save Version in any Mac app

I am no longer able to save a version in a Mac app in Lion.

I was working in TextEdit and suddenly got an error message telling me the document could not be autosaved. I had saved it once manually. Doing a Command-S generated another error message saying the file could not be saved.

I tried duplicating the file, and the duplicate could not be saved after the initial save. Moving the file to another folder didn't help. I also tried putting it in a Dropbox folder - that didn't allow me to save it, either.

I did a Repair Permissions and that didn't work. I logged out, powered down - no joy.

I created a test account (administrator) and I was able to save there, and auto save was working.

I CAN save documents in apps that don't work with Lion's autosave normally. For example, Word 2011 will save just fine. But TextEdit, Pages, etc. will not.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Posted on Sep 12, 2011 1:38 PM

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Answer 1

Gravity5

Level 1

0 points

Sep 12, 2011 2:33 PM in response to LeVeau

Go to Your home folder : Library : Preferences :

Find com.apple.autosave.plist

and

com.apple.finder.plist

Trash those two files, log out, log back in.

Your finder preferences will be reset. Try to save a file.

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Answer 2

LeVeau Author

Level 1

60 points

Sep 12, 2011 3:00 PM in response to Gravity5

Thanks for the suggestion.

com.apple.autosave.plist is not in that folder.

The other file is there. I'll trash that and see what happens.

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Answer 3

LeVeau Author

Level 1

60 points

Sep 16, 2011 11:27 AM in response to LeVeau

Thanks to a call to AppleCare (thanks, Jeff!), I got this worked out, and blogged it.

What solved it: Using CMD-R to boot into the repair utilities, opening a terminal windows, invoking the Reset Password tool which contains a different version of Repair Permissions that works on the Home folder.

Click the link for details.

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Answer 4

Hamlet1

Level 1

0 points

Mar 4, 2012 8:11 AM in response to LeVeau

I have the same problem as decribed by LeVeau, while working with Pages. This started to happen a couple of days ago. Unfortunately, I could not solve the problem the way he did. I booted my MacBook hitting CMD-R, had to unlock my startup-disk because it is encrypted (as hinted to in the comments of his blog post). When I repair permission, the windows notes "Running" and the turning circle just forever. It never stops. I let it run through a whole night, nothing happend. When I close the window, I get no warning or message or whatsoever. When I reboot, the problem is not solved. I also tried Applejack to solve it, but it apparently can't work on the encrypted disk in single user mode.

Does anyone have an idea on what I am doing wrong or what else I could try? The plist-files mentioned above are not in my library, so I could not delete them. I would be greatly thankful for any help.

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