Keynote crashed, presentation file disappeared

Question

Level 1

4 points

Keynote crashed, presentation file disappeared

In searching through the discussion forums, I've found a lot of disastrous problems that people have had with Keynote, but not this exact disaster.

I'm running Keynote '09 version 5.3, on OS 10.8.4. Today, about half an hour before an important presentation at work, I was running my presentation as a slide show, just to make sure all the slides seemed to be working okay. During the slide show, Keynote hung for a while, and then suddenly quit, leaving me looking at my desktop, with no other error message. I went to reopen the presentation, but the file was gone. It had simply vanished from the folder where it used to be. It's not in the Trash, nor is it anywhere else on my Mac, according to the file search that I ran. In Keynote, when I pull down the File -> Open Recent menu, the disappeared file does not appear in the list of recent files. If I pull down Apple -> Recent Items. I can see the disappeared file in the list of recent documents, but then if I try to select the file, nothing happens.

So here are my questions:

1. Can I recover my file? I've already had to cancel my presentation today, and I would be able recreate my .key file by going back to an older version and redoing three or four hours of work. But I'd prefer not to redo that work, if I can help it.

2. Is it safe for me to run Keynote? Is it going to continue destroying every presentation file that I open?

3. Is there some larger problem happening with my filesystem? Is it safe for me to run anything?

Posted on Jul 9, 2013 4:51 PM

Reply

Answer 1

WobWong

Level 1

0 points

Jul 10, 2013 2:18 AM in response to Medhead

Yes, this happens to me too. Don't tell me I have to go to PowerPoint? There must be more of us, is there any help?

Reply

Answer 2

Jul 15, 2013 11:37 PM in response to Medhead

I had the same problem... My keynote crashed on the podium in front of 900 people!!! This is VERY BAD!!! In september I will go back to PPT which is going to be a nightmare!!!!!!

Reply

Answer 3

JMB2

Level 1

10 points

Jul 16, 2013 11:17 AM in response to Medhead

I had this same problem. Hangs up. Crashes. File disappears. I restored the file from a backup, only to have it repeat. This is a serious Keynote problem.

The process for saving a Keynote file has never been very reliable when video is included.

Has there been a fix?

Reply

Answer 4

Medhead Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 16, 2013 11:52 AM in response to JMB2

I did get a nice email from the iWork group, saying that they're interested in this problem and they will look into it. I guess that means there's no fix right now, but maybe there will be some day.

It seems clear that I'm not the only person having this problem, and I'd say that makes Keynote a program that nobody should use, for any reason. I just hope that this discussion somehow gets picked up by other people before they end up putting a lot of work into .key presentations that disappear without a trace. And for those of us who are stuck using Keynote until we have time to convert our presentations to PowerPoint, I guess the lesson is that it's not good enough to save your work frequently - you also have to create whole new duplicate files for all of your incremental backups.

Reply

Answer 5

JMB2

Level 1

10 points

Jul 16, 2013 12:07 PM in response to Medhead

By the way, there was a new file in place of the keynote file that had this title but couldn't be opened:

Visual Trials SK.key.sb-a8d783b7-H38QrT

Reply

Answer 6

Jul 16, 2013 4:31 PM in response to Medhead

I have the same exact problem. It usually happens with movies and audio files. As soon as I add something Keynote crashes and my presentation is gone vaporized, beamed up, whatever.... it's gone for bad. But it happens recently, after recently updated java and iTunes. Mac retina 13" 10.8.4. Keynote 09.

Reply

Answer 7

JMB2

Level 1

10 points

Jul 16, 2013 4:40 PM in response to Medhead

Update: after I renamed the file "Visual Trials SK.key.sb-a8d783b7-H38QrT" to delete ".sb-a8d783b7-H38QrT", the file re-opened and is now working. Lost some work but at least recovered the majority of the file.

Reply

Answer 8

bradodo

Level 1

0 points

Jul 18, 2013 7:03 PM in response to Medhead

This has been happening occasionally at our school after updating to 10.8.4, using iWork '09 :-(

It seems to have only affected Keynote files that have video/audio files added to them.

Some keynote files could be recovered by going to the users Library, into Saved Application State: '~/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.iWork.Keynote.savedState'

The file will not be named the same as the original (kind of like the post from JMB2 above reported) and may not contain all changes made.

Might be some problem with saved application state correlating the original file? Not sure but it's made most of our staff afraid to use Keynote which is a shame.

A fix will be eagerly anticipated..

Reply

Answer 9

DrL

Level 1

110 points

Jul 21, 2013 9:07 PM in response to Medhead

Add me to the list. Unbelievable. No updates for years, now it's crashing ALL THE TIME on my MacBook Pro. I even write about using Keynote in one of our professional magazines and if Apple doesn't step up, I'm out. Just lost a presentation right now. Poof, gone, disappeared. Thank God I saved another version, but what, I now have to do this every other slide? Unbelievable.

Reply

Answer 10

bradodo

Level 1

0 points

Jul 22, 2013 5:33 PM in response to bradodo

Apologies, my last post was incorrect... We could recover files from the following location:

~/Library/Autosave Information/<hexstring>.genstore.index

where <hexstring>.genstore.index is a folder containing the deleted keynote files, with (as mentioned) a different file name. Sorting by date will narrow results and looking into the folder that correspond to the date required you should be able to see keynote file(s).

Sorry for any confusion

Reply

Answer 11

Medhead Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 22, 2013 9:01 PM in response to bradodo

I guess I wasn't as lucky as JMB2, because I didn't find any sort of temporary file in the directory from which my .key file vanished.

Bradodo's method didn't help me either. I have a ~/Library/Autosave Information/ directory, but it is totally empty. And my search fails to find a file called *genstore* anywhere.

I concur with DrL's description of this problem as "unbelievable."

Reply

Answer 12

AJ898

Level 1

10 points

Jul 23, 2013 8:38 PM in response to Medhead

This is a new problem which has started since the last system update....this is a major problem. I have hundreds of presentations and i don't have the time to convert. The program crashes every time I use it.

Reply

Answer 13

Medhead Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 24, 2013 5:14 AM in response to AJ898

DrL said "no updates for years..." does that mean we can't blame this on the latest system update? I do remember that, after one of the major OS updates in the middle of 2011, Keynote suddenly became unusable for me for a month or so, until Apple came up with a fix. That was also before I had to give a major presentation, and it was a huge problem for me. It's such a shame that Apple's quality has fallen off so dramatically in recent years. I guess all we can do now is publicize this problem as widely as possible, in order to help others to avoid progessional catastrophes, and perhaps motivate Apple to fix the problem.

For what it's worth, the .key file that I was working on at the time of my crash/disappearance did not have any videos in it. It did have two small embedded audio files, but I had deleted those before the time of the crash. Since the crash, I have tried opening various other .key files, which do not have audio or video, and I have not noticed any problems. However, I am obviously not willing to take the risk of working with these files extensively.

Reply

Answer 14

Jul 24, 2013 5:55 PM in response to Medhead

I had this happen to me last week during Keynote production for a corporate event.

Where on your hard drive was the Keynote file stored? Was it stored in a folder in your Home directory or was it stored on the root of Macintosh HD or was it stored on an external hard drive? I ask because I had this problem when the Keynote file was stored in a folder on the root of Macintosh HD. When I moved the folder to my Home directory the problem went away.

It might be purely coincidental that the problem cleared up after moving the folder. Also I was working with a group of other Keynote artists at the time, some of them were on Lion, some on Mountain Lion. It might be related to OSX's Auto Save "feature", since document management, in Apple's apps, works differently in Lion and Mountain Lion.

mike

Reply

Answer 15

Medhead Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 25, 2013 5:32 PM in response to Michael Sippel

My file was stored on my laptop, in a subdirectory under Macintosh HD.

Your mention of Apple's disastrous autosave "feature" reminded me of something. When I upgraded to Lion in 2011, I think one of the reasons why my computer suddenly became unusable was that Keynote was trying to autosave, but consistently hanging. Of course, I didn't want autosaving (does anybody?) I seem to remember that I globally disabled autosaving, or at least tried to. Is it possible that autosave is still active and causing havoc? When a file cleanly disappears without a trace like mine did, I'm inclined to wonder if some process intentionally deleted it, but failed to replace it with a new version.

Reply