Saturday, May 13, 2017

Egnyte Desktop Sync Errors With Keynote Files

Egnyte, and indeed most non-Apple file systems, have difficulty saving Keynote files.  The structure of Keynote files are atypical and as such Egnyte tends to see a directory structure rather than a single file.

Keynote has the option of saving files either as a "Single File" or a "Package" and for the purposes of file system compatibility, we recommend using a "Package."  From within Keynote go to File/Advanced/Change File Type:


Note: As a rule-of-thumb, we recommend that any Keynote file larger than 1GB be zipped before being saved to Egnyte.

By default, Keynote saves everything as a Single File.  If you go to Terminal and look at the file attributes you will notice that it actually appears as a directory rather than a single file:


This can cause problems with both Egnyte Desktop Sync and the Web UI.  The Web UI will  show Keynote data not as a single file but as a directory.  This makes the file unreadable from the Web UI and can cause syncing issues with Desktop Sync.  In Desktop Sync, you may see an error such as this:


Simply saving the file as a "Package" from within Keynote does not always resolve the problem, it may simply return a different error:

If you see this error you will need to change the permissions on the Keynote file in order for it to Sync.
  • Save the Keynote file as a Package
  • Open Terminal
  • Navigate to the folder containing the Keynote file
  • Type "chmod 744 [file name]
    • Example:  chmod 744 myfile.key
 If you type "ls -la" you will see that the file permissions have been set to allow the file owner (you) to Read/Write/Execute:


Normal Mac file permissions are 644 and look like this:






However, for some reason, Keynote files sometimes need the extra "execute" permission in order to get Egnyte to sync them correctly.

After changing the permissions, trigger a sync and it should complete without errors.