Bug : Pictures disappear on Seadrive/MacOS/PowerPoint

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 …

Why don’t you run a small scale test? Disable Sophos on a handful of machines. Pick those where the problems haven been most prevalent. If the problems disappear, you have substantiated the current working hypothesis and you can move on. Right now, you are guessing and speculating.

And, no, I don’t think it is a gigantic problem to disable Sophos. On Windows machines, you’ll have Windows Defender kicking in and most Mac users claim that they don’t need an AV program anyway.

I just posted a bug I realised i similar to this one. Please check it here: Files corrupt on SeaDrive - #2 by Jens_Olsson

We also lose images on Powerpoint and Keynote. Could be because we have been working on the same file maybe.

Antivirus disabled, does not remedy the problem.

The best way is to use Seafile syncing client. Powerpoint and Keynote may have some special behaviours can’t not compatible with virtual drive client.

Is this likely? Isn’t OneDrive using the same technology as SeaDrive? Wouldn’t OneDrive suffer from the same restrictions?

This topic is for MacOS. For Windows, SeaDrive and OneDrive use the same technology. On MacOS, SeaDrive use MacFuse, a third-party library that maintained by one developer.

Absolutely. Sorry, my bad!

Hello,

We choose seafile for seadrive client because we have a lot of libraries and we cannot have all our libraries synchronized on our Mac machine. We were very happy to have a client allowing to see all directories and automatically synchronization of directories.

We are very very disappointed as you tell us that it won’t work with Powerpoint !
You should add this information in the list of features that are not supported.

Is there a chance that this bug is solved in next seadrive release ?

Thank you in advance,

Céline PORHEL

I’m not saying it won’t work with Powerpoint. It works fine in my MacOS, but I only have a few pptx files. What I mean is that due to technology limitation, SeaDrive may have compatibility issues with some versions of Powerpoint on some version of MacOS.

By technology limitation, I mean there is no official file system drive from Apple for developers to build a virtual drive.

@madein Hi Florian, knowing that you only use Macs, allow me this question: Have you ever encountered problems with PowerPoint and/or Keynote files when using SeaDrive?

Hey @rdb ,

we had some irritating moments with Keynote-Files. We have an agency-presentation deck (which contains everything and is quite large though, 3gb+) which did weird things when opening directly via SeaDrive (we’re using almost exclusively SeaDrive to open and edit files). My assumption was, that it’s because of how macOS stores those Keynotes (to macOS its a “file” in the finder, to seadrive its more like a folder). Our Fix: We store the Presentation-Deck Keynote on the server. When we want to edit it, we create a new copy locally and edit there.

As to Powerpoint I just asked the team if anyone had any problems: Nope, nothing. I can ask what PPT Version everyone is using, if that helps…?

If you need anything else, please ping! Happy to give something back to the community finally!
We had Seafile and Seadrive now for over 2 years and love it. We only had one hiccup, which was solved very quickly. After that, nothing serious. We had some errors with Sketch-Files in the last couple of days, but still need to pinpoint wether thats a Sketch, SeaDrive or other Problem. I’ll investigate and get start a new thread if necessary. We are roughly 15 people which work daily with the server with various amounts and sizes of files (text files, videos, images, design files, etc…). Alright, I stop now, I sound like a Brand Ambassador… ;D

Cheers!
Florian

Thanks for sharing your experience !

We are all working with MacOS (35 computers), all our files are reached via Seadrive. We use a lot .pptx, and often work on same files without knowing someone else has opened same file in same time.
We disabled SOPHOS now. MacOS are : Catalina, BigSur, Mojave. Seadrive version are : 2.0.16.

Some questions :

  • To Seadrive developpers : Do you have hope to get agreement with Apple ? Is there trading action on-going ?
  • To Mac user : Do you know how to rebuild a .pptx once it has been unzip (to allow to change pictures for instance) ?
  • For those that did not have any issue with .pptx, which MacOS is running on your computer ?

I think anyway with bug description that I have gave above, that something can be analysed from developper point of view : the fact that pictures are OK when the previous .pptx is open and disappear when we close it is a good indication/clue, don’t you think ?

Thank you,

Céline PORHEL

@CelinePorhel Can you share a powerpoint file that has the problem for us to test?

@madein Thank you for sharing your experience. We have never tested 3GB-sized keynote files. Do you have problems with smaller Keynote files?

Hey @Jonathan ,

never tested it to be honest. Maybe we should give it another try, maybe the problem was solved in the meantime.

Cheers
florian