Keynote files deleting after update to 10.8.4

Just wanted to chime in that this is happening to me as well. More than a little disconcerning to literally watch a file disappear off your desktop. I've taken to making a copy of a .key file before working on the original.

Like others have said, this is a show-stopper for keynote. I am a professor who relies on presentations for teaching, and I suffer from the random deletion problem - in the middle of a presentation, keynote will crash *and delete the presentation file*. I think I have identified the source of the problem.

It appears that whenever a keynote file is saved or autosaved, the presentation file is actually renamed and/or deleted, and a new one put in its place. If you watch the finder window, you can sometimes see your presentation file (especially if it is large) disappear and then reappear. This leads me to suspect that when an autosave occurs during a presentation, if it happens at the wrong time, this will "disappear" the movie file that keynote was expecting to find within the document file. The result would be a crash, presumably happening before that autosave operation could complete and put the new document version in place.

Why this happened with my 10.8 upgrade I don't know. Keynote was perfectly happy in 10.7 and earlier - this never happened to me before. I suspect that OSX has changed the way that filesaving happens, leading to this weird, transient disappearance of document files during the save.

Similar to what others have said, my temporary solution is to frequently duplicate the presentation file, after saving it.

My long-term solution is powerpoint. And in the meantime, I am encouraging every colleague I meet (an increasingly large number) to switch to powerpoint before the same disaster happens to them.

Well I had the time to call into Apple today and got moved up the chain to someone who seemed like they would make this issue have more priority. They suggested I try replicating the problem in Safe mode or making a new user account to see if the problem persists. I was calling from overseas on skype so I could not walk through the issue of testing things out with them but you guys may consider doing this if you are States side and reporting back to us what you discovered.

I just thought of something. I have run into numerous difficulties because I chose to make my file systems case-sensitive (particularly with Adobe software, it turns out). Unfortunately it's hard to go back once you make this choice, otherwise I would have done so already, so I am living with the problems.

Now I am wondering if this Keynote issue could also be related to case-sensitive file systems.

Are there others out there, with this problem, who have case-sensitive hard drives? You can "get info" on the HD icon in the finder, and look for "Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)".

Actually, to test if the problem only happens with case-sensitive HD's, the question should really be the other way around- does anyone with this problem *not* use a case-sensitive file system.

I'm not using case sensitive and I have the problem. What I do notice is that it only happens on my late 2010 Macbook Air, not on my 2011 iMac. At this point, Keynote is totally unrelialble.

I've disabled autosave in Keynote as per the instructions here. I'll be playing around with a Keynote file over the next few hours and will report back.

After disabling autosave, I no longer seem to have this problem. When you save a file, however, it does save an identical file with a ~ at the end of it, and in the same location as the original file.

Wow, really? This would be a terrific development. Thanks for the link- I will try this immediately and report back after I am confident about the results.

No problems so far. I am 99% sure this "fixed" the problem. One nasty side effect that has cropped up is that now, occasionally, I run into an error "xxxx could not be saved" when I try to save my document. But this can at least be circumvented by copying stuff into the clipboard, quitting, and restarting. A useful workaround. Thanks chatoyer!

PS I registered as an Apple developer and entered a bug report, including all the info described here by myself and chatoyer. They asked me for crash log files, so there is at least a one human being working on this at Apple now. Cross your fingers....

I started to running into my files disappearing after doing the 10.8.4 update, and I started doing my presentations using copies of the original file. So if I ran into the problem which I have been, it would only impact a copy of the file. One thing I noticed over the past week or so is that I have not seen the files disappearing anymore. So I went back and checked to see what may have changed in that past week, and I remembered that I had installed the 10.8.5 supplemental update. My guess at this point is that fixed the problem. Just wanted to pass that along, and hope it clears up things for everyone in this thread.

I just had a Keynote presentation that i've been working on for a week vanish into thin air. Gone, Kaput, no Time machine backup either. Frustrated as ****. Now i need to recreate a week's work overnight, as my presentation's tomorrow. I use Mavericks and the most recent version of Keynote, so this issue hasn't been fixed. ******. Aarrgh... FIX THIS APPLE!

The 10.8.5 update fixed this for myself and Cris Berman, at least. I am still using this version of the OS. If the same problem has cropped up in 10.9, then you can fix it by following chatoyer's link to disable autosave, which I was never that fond of anyway. Hope this helps you.

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Feedback

Backup would have saved something for you. To impliment that is your responsibility not Apple's

Probably what he meant was that his backup files in time machine were deleted too. This is an inexplicable (and awful) side effect of the bug that more than one of us encountered.