Bug : Pictures disappear on Seadrive/MacOS/PowerPoint

Hello,
A frequently occured bug is that sometimes when we open a file with powerpoint with seadrive, all pictures have been removed from the file… We have to get older versions and even in older versions, pictures are not there anymore … sometimes we can retrieve an older version which still have pictures and have to copy back them … It appears with MacOS Catalina, High Sierra, Mojave, and we cannot identify une special case when it occurs.
Did this bug happen to anyone ??
Do you have any idea on the way we should look through ?

Many thanks in adance,
Céline PORHEL

Seadrive works on a file, not file content. It is not possible for Seadrive to only damage images in a PPT file.

By the way, what file extension do you use, ppt or pptx?

Hi Céline, I have never heard of this problem before and I am seeing a lot of SeaDrive clients.

I guess the problem occurs when the file is saved on the computer. Can you trace it back to one / two users? So does the problem always occur when the file were saved last by these users?

Are you running a antivirus software on your Macs?

Hi,
First of all, thank you very much for your fast answer.
We failed to reproduce the issue by ourselves. It happens to different colleagues who works on Mojave, Catalina, High Sierra. Every body work on Ma. The version of MacOS does not seem to matter. It happens quite frequently, like 1 times a week. But it is not systematic, I mean it does not happen for all files, any times. Extension of files is .pptx and it also happenned once on word (.docx). We work on Microsoft 2019. However, we notice that often the steps to get this issue is : a user save the file, then a 2nd user open this file quite quickly after it has been saved by the first user, he can see pictures, save the file and by then the first user open again the file and cannot NOT see the pictures anymore. It is not always in the same order, but it is each time this kind of situation. An other thing is that sometimes, once pictures disappeared, when we open an older version of the file to get pictures back that are not anymore in older version of the file either.

We run Sophos Antivirus on Mac.

Do not hesitate to ask further information, I really need help.

Thanks in advance,
Céline PORHEL

Thank you very much for your fast asnwers.

We use .pptx on Microsoft 2019.

It looks like when opening with Seadrive, power point loose the link to pictures …

How link to pictures are retrieve by power point from Seadrive ?

I also give more details in reply below on discussion.

Thank you very much in advance for your help,

Céline PORHEL

To echo Daniel’s earlier post: Seafile does not distinguish between the images in the document and the document itself. It’s one thing for Seafile.

Can you disable Sophos on a few machines just to check if it causes conflicts?

This issue only happens on Seadrive client but not with Seafile client. Also, I guess pictures are not stored on the same place than the rest of the power point document. I thought having understand this on Office website? But not sure.

Do you think that Sophos would block pictures one day on a file and not the previous days ? That is really strange … I understand your point however, I am a little afraid of disabling security several days on several machine waiting for bug occurs …

Is there any difference between Seadrive and Seafile in the way it deals with power point and pictures ?

Office files are ZIP archives containing one or more xml files and other objects. The xml files contain text information in word documents and tabular data in Excel documents. Embedded pictures are saved in their original format but within the ZIP archive.

Seafile does not look at the content of the archive. It takes DOCX, XLSX files as what they are: files. (Just the same way Seafile processes ZIP archives.)

I am not familiar with Sophos. But modern AV solutions do not only use static virus detection techniques. So, yeah, this may result in the observed behavior.

No.

Hello,
This bug has just happen again. 2 colleagues names Eloise et Antoine were working on the same .pptx.
But they did not know they were working at the same time on the same file. By the way, no “conflict version” war created by Seafile.
Here is story :
The file “V4.pptx” was opened by Antoine.
Eloïse, create a new version by changing name into “V5.pptx”, she makes changes and saves the file and close it.
During this time, Antoine keeps on working on “V4.pptx”, makes changes, savings, and finally close it after Eloïse.
When Eloïse wants to open it again 3 hours later on. All pictures (even mask of the slides) have disappeared… Here is capture :

Why should Seafile create a conflict file? Antoine and Eloise were working on two different files.

What did you make of my tips in my previous post (AV)

Please “open” the PPTX file with 7-ZIP or Winzip. You’ll see the contents of the file. There is a folter ppt and within this folder, there should be another folder media. Please check if the images are in there. If they are - which I assume - then Seafile has not touched the images. It’s your presentation editior, aka PowerPoint, which has a problem saving files or interpreting files.

Thank you very much for your fast answers.

  1. Your right, there should not have conflict version created in this case. That is another thing that we rarely get conflict version despite on the fact that we often work on same files. But indded it is not the point of my issue related in this post.
  2. I have juste unarchived .pptx and I do see different pictures in directories for v4 where as on V5 the unarchiver cannot work. Error message from “The Unarchiver” says : “Cannot extract “ppt/media/picture47.png” from archive “211011_lancement GECC 4_V5.pptx” : the archive file is dommaged.” And, that the point with all pictures… So there is a Seadrive issue on those pictures…

image

By the way, to repare my file, I copied pictures from V4 Archive to V5 Archive but then I do not know how to rebuild a .pptx from Archive…

Last try : I did retrieve a .pptx from the Archive after having copied correct pictures from V4. I have compressed again and then change extension from .zip to .pptx. But then, .pptx cannot open. This is error message :
image
"Sorry cannot read “^0”.

Hello,
Here is a new information about issue related above :
If we open V4.pptx first, the presentation is correct with pictures, by then if we keep V4.pptx open and we open V5.pptx, V5 is ok : pictures are right there !!!

Also, we only have this issue with Seadrive client, this never happen with Seafile client, neither on our on-site server.

Looking forward to read you, thanks in advance !

I am almost certain: Disable Sophos and your problems will be gone. (Or whitelist it, but this is less certain to be successful.)

Thank you for your answer, however :

  1. Would you let professional computers work without any anti-virus ?
  2. Do you have any recommandation if SOPHOS does not allow us to use seadrive ?
  3. Could you explain how Sophos would lead to this behaviour ?? Why this happens to time to time on any computers and not with seafile_client ?

Also :
4. Do you know how to rebuild a .pptx on macOS from archives ?

Thank you in advance,
Céline PORHEL

As for 1.) I am not necessarily talking about removing all AV from your computer. (Though this could be considered…) Besides Sophos, there is an abundance of AV solutions that don’t cause SeaDrive to freak out.

As for 2.) I am just running Microsoft Defender on my computer which has a fairly good antivirus engine. MS Defender ships with Windows 10 and is its default AV solution. When you uninstall Sophos (or any other third party AV solution for this matter), it automatically starts.

In the past, I used Avira which I liked. I also like Kaspersky, but there have been reports about some problems with SeaDrive too. (I haven’t heard of any recent problems though. The company Kaspersky Labs is a Seafile customer.)

As for 3.) see Dario’s post in the other thread you posted

As for 4.) Sorry, I don’t.

Hello,
Have you ever tried “TrendMicro” as AV ? This is the AV that our subcontractor advises us as AV. Do you have an officiel list of AV compatible with Seadrive on Mac ?
Thank you,
Céline PORHEL

Dario did not noticed those issues on Mac, whereas we have lot of issues like those on our Mac : directory that appear and appear whereas we want to delete it, directeries that are created both, pictures that cannot be read anymore inside a .pptx …