Keynote on iPad not syncing to iCloud and losing recent edits

I have been a Keynote user almost since it existed. I would easily describe myself as a power user for the past ten years or so, and have well over 200 presentations that I use to teach both math and science.

Having said that, I'm stumped about this behavior. Yesterday I edited slides 56-59 of this presentation but did not finish while at work. No problem, I know how iCloud works (or so I thought) so I just closed up the iPad and left it to charge at the office. But when I got home and opened up my personal iPad with the intention of finishing my work, my earlier edits were not there. I went to my PC and opened up Keynote in the browser—also no recent edits. Clearly, office iPad is not backing up to iCloud.

I opened settings to make sure that "Store documents & data in iCloud Drive" was checked, and it is. Why wouldn't my work get synced?

Oh well, I have to go into work an hour early tomorrow to finish my edits before my first class.

I get to work and open the iPad. All my edits are still there. I finish the work and edit/update those four slides.

Fast-forward to today. I get home and open my work iPad (I carried it home with me) to work on tomorrow's presentation and I get this message that I am working offline:

There is my confirmation that my work is not being backed up to iCloud.

But wait a minute—I am online! You can see the WiFi icon at the top right, and I can browse the internet and chat with my coworkers. Why does Keynote think I'm offline? How do I make it realize that I am online?

And it is at this point when I notice that my earlier updates to slides 56-59 is gone. My presentation has reverted to an earlier version. Why wouldn't a local copy of my work be saved even if Keynote thinks I'm offline?

Is there any way to find the version of this presentation that I was working on this morning?

Posted on Nov 9, 2026 2:03 AM

1 reply

augratin Author

Level 1 (88 points)

Nov 10, 2026 4:37 AM in response to augratin

Update:

After doing some of my own troubleshooting I discovered that this happens on presentations that I have shared with others. Apparently Apple considers this sharing to be "collaborating" even though I have shared read-only links. I don't consider it collaborating if I just let somebody look at my presentation and not edit it. The word "collaborate" means work together, and read-only links don't allow people to work on my presentations.

Anyway, I guess I have to update Keynote to the newest version so make this problem go away. When I tried to update Keynote, it said I needed to update the iOS first. So I did that, even though I don't like doing major updates in the middle of the school year... if the update bricks my device, I am out of luck and have no device to use for teaching.

You'll never guess what happened. The iOS update bricked my iPad. My Microsoft Surface Pro reports: "The iPad "iPad" could not be updated. An unknown error occurred (1109). 06B4.0000"

I took the iPad to work and tried on another PC, this time a different message: The software was corrupted during download.

I took it to our computer lab where they have Macs to see if that would make any difference. It Mac reports "downloading the software for your iPad" but there is no status bar or progress indicator, so I don't know if it's really happening. After an hour it was time to go home so I left it there, connected to the Mac. We'll see when it looks like when I go in tomorrow morning.

So I no longer need assistance. Instead, it looks like I need a new iPad.