It breaks my heart to hear about users who have lost an important presentation and can’t restore their prezi. Whether this is caused by computer glitches, human error, or Internet gremlins, it can cause no end of grief. If you’ve got a sales meeting, keynote, or any other important presentation, take measures to ensure that you don’t accidentally lose it. Establish a backup habit that will allow you to restore your Prezi presentations should disaster strike.
How to recover a lost Prezi?
Save Multiple Online Copies
Prezi’s autosave feature is as much of a blessing as a curse. Mistakes can usually be corrected using Undo (Ctrl-Z), but there are some actions that can’t be corrected this way. After a fruitless afternoon of editing, you might wish you could exit your prezi without saving it, so you can restore your prezi to an earlier copy. Autosave prevents you from doing this. Prezi doesn’t save previous versions of your work, but you can protect your precious prezis by setting up your own backup program.
Don’t be misled by the desktop Prezi
Paid Prezi subscribers have the option of downloading a desktop version of Prezi Next. It allows you to edit your prezis offline instead of in the Cloud but it doesn’t help you restore a prezi. On the old Prezi Classic platform, the desktop application you had the option to keep only a local copy. In the event of a glitch or uh-oh in the Cloud, your prezi was safely stored on your computer. Prezi Next does not operate the same way. Even though you can edit your project offline, it automatically syncs with the Cloud as soon as you connect to the Internet. Your most recent version of the prezi (mistakes and all) is copied to your desktop as soon as you log in to your Prezi account. So there is no way to restore Prezi to a previous version.
Create a system to safeguard your work
Since Prezi doesn’t have a way to restore a prezi, you should save older versions of your projects. Develop the habit of backing up multiple versions of your work on a regular basis by following these instructions. You’ll be glad you have a backup system if you ever need to restore a prezi to an earlier version.
- Exit the prezi at least once an hour
- From the Your Prezis dashboard, select Save a Copy
- Rename the title of the copied prezi using the current date and time
- Return to the original prezi and continue editing
If you use this backup routine, you’ll want to delete your oldest copies regularly to keep your dashboard from filling up with old copies. I suggest you keep only three copies of your work. This way you can return to your first backup if you encounter a problem. If that doesn’t take you back far enough, you have an additional version you can restore.
