[DaGuy]

Jaguar has been extremely reliable for me with not one single crash since it came out!! So I was baffled by what it did yesterday.

I noticed one of my Apps preferences got reset to its defaults. I didn't think much of it but then I notice some other apps were also having some unusual problems. So, I decided to restart the machine. When I got back in, I found all my user preferences for all apps including the finder were set to defaults! That means that I had the blue aquatic background the dock always visible in the center and the MacOSX web link in the folders section of the dock -as if I was a new user! Surprisingly enough, the files that were on the desktop were still there. The most annoying thing was that mail forgot about my HD mailboxes.

Since I have .Mac I was able to restore Safari links, Sticky Notes and some other preferences easily but dang... this was really scary. I eventually found that my prior user Library folder was moved into one of my own private folders. How did that happened?? I have no idea. Luckily, since everything was there I was able to restore all my app preferences and mail folders. No harm done at the end except for a mild heart attack and about an hour trying to restore things.

I would like to understand how this could have happened, any ideas?

[Art Vandelay]

You probably unknowingly dragged it there by mistake. It's not like the system is just going to start moving folders around.

[DaGuy]

Originally posted by Art Vandelay:
You probably unknowingly dragged it there by mistake. It's not like the system is just going to start moving folders around.

That's certainly possiblity but in all my life as a Mac user, I've never made such a bad drag-n-drop.



I remember something else. When I was copying and pasting an icon, I noticed that my Finder toolbar lost its custom settings.

I had the "get info" button on the Finder toolbar. After pressing it once, it vanished all by itself... I also remember having to go to the Finder menu to use the "get info" item and complete the copy/paste of the icon.

So this suggests that there was something funky going on with the Finder and the "get info".

Note that the folder where my user Libary folder got moved to was in fact one of the folders that I was handling during the copy/paste operation. But also note that the Library folder itself was not involved in the copy/paste process.

I've heard some ramblings about icon copying/pasting bugs. Could this have anything to do with it?

[OpenStep]

"How much disk space did you have available when this happened?"

[DaGuy]

Originally posted by OpenStep:
"How much disk space did you have available when this happened?"

Plenty, at least 23 Gigs.

Is disk space sometimes associated with this kind of strange phenomena?

[Sarc]

don't think it's HDD rerlated, that happens when you have <200MB so you can't use VM right ...

I seen it happen before thoug, can't tell what causes it though.