The Forgotten: Disappearing File

[Carlisle Percival]

Add this to my unhappiness with PPT for Mac yesterday, I¹m working on a
presentation and hit ³apple² ³s² to save and the file disappears like it
never existed. I go to ³file² and look for recent files that I have opened
and it¹s not there nor in recent projects nor all projects. I do a search
in finder even looking for invisible files and it¹s nowhere to be found. I
called tech support for Apple and they suggested that perhaps and autosave
was taking place at the instant that I saved. Their only suggestion was to
get some third party data recovery software.

I didn¹t have time for that as I had only lost 1-1 1/2 hours of work so I
just redid the presentation. Any words to the wise or help out there?

Cheers,
Carl Percival

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Carlisle,

Other than what you described is highly unusual I can't say too much.
When PowerPoint uses the save command most of the work is done by MacOS.

I would get a good disk maintenance program such as DiskWarrior or
TechTools Pro and see if the file system on the computer needs to be
repaired.

-Jim

 

[Johannes Vetsch]

Hello (first post)

One of my clients reported the same problems a few weeks ago, on
ppt-files that vanished locally as well as opened over the file
server. Today the same client reports to me the issue has happened on
a second machine.

The first user is updated with service pack 1 2004 and is saving the
documents "every two sentences" and hadn't the issue again in the
meantime.

That's where the second issue reported on this list comes in....
powerpoint v X (on this list reported with 2004) working for a
longtime (more than one or two hours) on a file the following happens:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...t&selm=%[email protected]

- powerpoint gives an error messages about not enough available
harddisk space, then or with the next save it crashes. When you look
at the "last change" date and time you can see that the saving
obviously stopped much earlier.

Up to 2 hours got lost on one file before it crashed. On another file
I controlled after a certain time I had a half an hour black out,
whithout showing any error massages. The only way to avoid this issue,
is to quit Powerpoint and then restart working on the file til it
doesn't do any savings (controle if "last change" time isn't changing
anymore).

I don't know if those two issues are related, but as they happen the
same way under different configurations and are "save"-related I doubt
that it is a file system problem and not ppt's handling of temp files.

Because you have to work a pretty longtime on the same document it is
pretty hard to reproduce.

regards
johannes