Project won't save - Storyline 2

Sep 23, 2014

Getting a different error nearly every time.

Cannot access part because parent package was closed.

Cannot access a closed stream

Store must be open for this operation.

What gives? I can't re-save it as a new file. I'm screwed. About to lose half a day of work here. Any help? We've had this for less than a week, and never had (major) issues with Storyline 1, like this. Saving on C drive. Windows 7. 

Please get back to me asap.

187 Replies
Adam Y

I had my IT team recover a copy of the file which i'd stored on my network. (neither the local copy nor the network copy would save properly).  So I lost a day's work, but now I'm able to save properly.

 

I've also upgraded to a new PC, by  coincidence. So the "work on the file on a new machine" work around seems to work.

Jean-Guy  Boulay

@Jannicke Wilhelmsen. I'm pretty much 99% sure that it's video related based on the conversation Justin Grenier has had in this thread. I can confirm that the projects i've experienced the problem in are all video based. My projects that are none video based don't have this issue. I had originally thought it was hardware based, but the one thing that other users (so far) have in common is video.

It would be great if others can confirm this.

Jean-Guy  Boulay

@Jannicke Wilhelmsen. I don't know. I have been resorting to the suggested file recovery made by the articulate staff, Using the windows task manager to end the process of storyline. When you open the project up after ending the process you'll be asked to recover your project. Once it's recovered I've been able to save it to a new name.

Also if you look in "<drive letter>:\Users\~username~\AppData\Roaming\Articulate\Storyline" you'll see a list of tmp files, I believe those are the recovery files you might be able to open them up by making a copy and naming them to .story.

Max Laboy

I was able to advance on Friday by saving after every little edit. When the error would pop up (after a few edits), I would close the project, wait a few minutes and then reopen the project and was able to get in a few more saves before repeating the process again. Makes for slow going, but at least I only lost at most a page of work and was able to redo that with not too much pain... we will see how it goes today.

Jannicke Wilhelmsen

Thank you @Jean-Guy Boulay. I will look into the files. And, I will also try to remove the videos from my files, to see if it makes any difference.

I have also made one-by-one editing and saving after each editing, but it almost takes forever...  I try to remove my videos, just to see what happens!

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi all,

Thanks for continuing to share information here about when you run into this error and the ways in which you're able to work around it. If you're not already working with our Support engineers in a case, please connect with them here so that they can continue to gather and compile this information for our QA team as they continue to investigate this error. 

Max Laboy

It is very slow going but if you save after every slide you edit, the most you will lose is that page - then save as another name, close the program down and after a few minutes open either your original or the renamed version. Either way you should be able to get a few saves in before the error occurs again. At least this has been working for me.

Has anyone else having this issue noticed that when the project does actually save it does so very slowly? I have to wait a good 2 minutes for each successful save.

Max Laboy

Your project is a single slide?
If so, maybe try going straight to a save as instead of just save? Most are finding that even if the error appears during save as, that the new file is saved anyway.
I do not envy tracking this bug down since it seems to have no consistency other than the projects contain video files - is that also the case for you Ash?

Rachel Anderson

Oh no I've looked through all these pages hoping that by the 10th page someone would announce a solution. I have sent in my support case. The number is #00445523. My project has videos as well. It did start my project in Storyline 2. In fact I made sure that I had the latest update installed before I started working with putting the videos in today. My computer has 12GB of RAM memory, and I didn't have anything heavy running in the background while I was working. Copying and pasting my slides into another Storyline 2 project window didn't work for me unfortunately as someone suggested earlier.

I'm really hoping you all can fix this issue. I dread the thought of having to start over especially since there's a chance that I'll just run into the same issue again considering that my project must have videos in it. 

Hope to hear some good news from you all soon! Storyline has always been a very reliable program that my team and I would praise over Adobe Captivate. Since this is the first real serious issue I've ran into I haven't changed my opinion but I do hope to hear about a fix soon.

Jean-Guy  Boulay

Well, I've had some success in the last two weeks. I did a little research on how I could get applications to perform better and found something created by AMD that seems to really improve Storylines' performance and I never had a save issue since I started using it. It's called Ramdisk and it''s free. It's not the ideal way we want to run Storyline, but it seems to work.

First I installed and reviewed the instructions from AMD on how to set it up.
Bassically it takes your Ram and allocates a portion of it for specific use and calls it a ramdisk. I have 8GBs of ram, the program is limited to 4GB allocation in freeware mode. I didn’t want to allocate that much anyway so I set 2.5 GB’s up for the Ramdisk.

Next I uninstalled Storyline 2 and did a forced Location install of the program to the ramdisk using the instructions provided by articulate:
http://www.articulate.com/support/storyline-2/how-to-change-the-installation-location-for-articulate-storyline-2

After the install I copied over my project 600MB project to the ramdisk and I still had 1.25Gbs left on the ramdisk. Plenty of room for the project to grow.

During my edits I noticed the projects published 3x faster, saved about 2x faster and I never had a lockup or save error.

Only draw backs I could see is that my system slowed down for any other tasks which is likely due to the reduced available ram for the system. If you use it, I would suggest that when you’re done using storyline that you copy your project to your normal save location. The ramdisk will save the stoyline app and files in a ramdisk.img that can be unloaded/loaded at anytime, but will start with your windows if you don't unload it before shutting down.

Max Laboy

The one thing I have found that seems to keep the error away for a while is to delete ALL app data/temp files from both the temp articulate and root temp. It triples the amount of good saves I get before the error strikes.
I also save after every edit - doing all this is a HUGE time suck as each save takes almost 5 minutes to perform and the program is outputting a ridiculous amount of temp files. In less than a week my entire HD was filled with temp files from articulate!

Good luck!