Keynote files deleting after update to 10.8.4

It just happened again. I edited a Keynote file, played the presentation and it froze. Then, when I looked in the folder that had my presentation, the file was completely gone.

What is going on here???

Had another issue with Keynote this morning. Presentation hung and could not be stopped for a few minutes (ESC and arrows to advance to next slide did nothing). When it was finally released, it kept complaining about being unable to find media files.

Quitting and restarting turned out OK (and my file was not deleted as before), but this is still disconcerting and I hope it doesn't happen during a presentation.

I just deleted all the Keynote .plist files in my preference folder. I'll see if this helps at all.

This is very frustrating...

Everything was working perfectly until I updated to 10.8.4, so I think a hardware problem is less likely than a software one. Thanks for checking in though.

The backup (Time Machine Drive) is only a few months old. It is a Lacie Thunderbolt drive.

The HD on the laptop is the original 768 GB Solid State Drive (so less than a year old). Everything was working perfectly until I updated to 10.8.4.

I'm making a clone of my HD right now with Carbon Copy Cloner for added protection. I'll then go mess with some more Keynote files and see if they start deleting themselves again.

It's weird. Time Machine wouldn't restore the deleted files when I searched back in time within the folder that contained them. It's like they were never there in the first place. However, I had these files in a different folder a few months ago, and it was able to pull those up and restore them.

Maybe the directory or file system corruption caused Time Machine to not match the location of the files on the backup with their orignal location.

Here are the errors that were reported by Disk Utility:

2013-06-05 11:52:18 -0700: Checking volume bitmap.

2013-06-05 11:52:18 -0700: Volume bitmap needs minor repair for orphaned blocks

2013-06-05 11:52:18 -0700: Checking volume information.

2013-06-05 11:52:18 -0700: Invalid volume free block count

2013-06-05 11:52:18 -0700: (It should be 45013867 instead of 32213266)

I opened and edited the Keynote files again and they worked fine. However, when I went to save one of them after editing, I got the following message:

"The location of the document "Chapter 6.key" cannot be determined. You can specify where to save it." Followed by two boxes: Cancel and Save As...

I chose "Save As" and chose my desktop as the location and Keynote immediately crashed. When I reopened the document again, the changes were still there and upon further editing, SAVE is working normally.

So, I'm stumped. The good news is that the files are working (for now, at least). What concerns me is why this happened (I don't know) and will it happpen again?

The Disk Utility Errors along the way are also concerning. Last year, I had an issue with the autosave feature in MS Office (a known, serious issue). Basically, if you have Autosave turned on and are working with very large files, the autosave function will attempt to overwrite the same section of the hard drive, resulting in serious disk errors. It took down my system completely and I had to recover from a backup. After that, I now use Pages exclusively.

With Keynote (and most other Mac applications), the "Versions" feature does kind of the same thing--periodically saving changes to the document so they can be recovered later. This makes me paranoid that I may have a failed drive again in the near future.

GordonGecko9:

- First, make sure you back up all remaining Keynote presentations. Hopefully, you have a backup of the one that got deleted. I had to get a copy from another folder. Once the file was deleted, Time Machine suddenly thought it was never there in the first place too. That's right, the deleted file was also deleted from Time Machine--even months back.

- Once you have backups of your files, run Disk Utility and see if there are any errors. I had a few, so booted into the Recovery partition and repaired.

- Remove all your Keynote .plist files from the directory: /Users/your username/Library/Preferences. Your Library folder will be hidden unless you hold the OPTION key and then select the GO menu at the top. You can just move these files out of that folder and keep them elsewhere if you want them again.

- Check your console log to see if any errors were reported about the time of the crash. I had some message about Flip4Mac confilciting with another video codec, so I deleted Flip4Mac. Not sure if it mattered, but I didnt' really need it anyway.

- Since you have backups of your files now, you can start playing around with Keynote again to see if your problem is solved. Here is what I found:

> After deleting the .plist files, I sill had issues after editing presenations. The changes would take, but then when I went to save the file, I got an error message that the location couldn't be found. When I chose "Save As" isntead, Keynote crashed. However, when I rellaunced Keyonte, the file was saved in its orginal location. (Before I deleted the .plist files, the presenation was gone after Keynote crashed).

> Subsequent edits and saves worked normally on the same file. As I opened other presenations from the same folder in the finder, I got the same errors (crashing and file not saving). But then, upon relaunch everything seemed fine.

It seems that something with 10.8.4 is causing directory errors with Keynote files. When you go to save an edited presenation, it gets confused about where to put it and the file gets deleted instead.

Please keep me posted on if the above "fix" works for you and if you notice anything else.