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Users prefs trashed again...
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RoofusPennymore
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Join Date: Oct 1999
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Oct 17, 2003, 12:35 PM
 
After waking my computer up from sleep yesterday I was getting some strange behavior. Mail.app forgot its settings as did the dock and some other apps. This is the second time I have had this problem. It appears most of my preferences got trashed. This time I have been using Apple's BackUp to back my whole user account to an external drive. So I went and restored just the preferences folder and restarted. Apparently a bad idea becasue just about every program ignored the restored pref files and started with new ones. I was able to get Mail.app to use its restored prefs by locking the prefs file before opening mail.app. I don't want to have to do that with every file.

I also lost my keychain file which I was able to restore. But Camino now no longer "links" the web sites to the passwords I have saved in it.

I can't get some system prefs to work. For example Salling Clicker seems to load but the prefs are just blank (even after uninstalling and resintalling).

Grrrr... Quite frustraiting.
---I'm on a low Microsoft diet.
     
wadesworld
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Join Date: Apr 2001
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Oct 17, 2003, 02:48 PM
 
Are you low on disk space? That's generally the cause.

Wade
     
RoofusPennymore  (op)
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Oct 17, 2003, 02:56 PM
 
30 out of 60 GB available. So I went into root. Renamed the exisiting library folder to lib.old. Put in the library folder from the backup package and rebooted. All seemes normal with the world now as the prefs seem to be good.

Let this be a lesson to those that dont back up...

Edit: What I cannot figure out is why MessageSorting.plist was not in the backup archive? This is the file that contains all the rules for Mail.app. Great, now I have to recreat all my rules.
( Last edited by RoofusPennymore; Oct 17, 2003 at 03:02 PM. )
---I'm on a low Microsoft diet.
     
malvolio
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Oct 18, 2003, 10:58 AM
 
Originally posted by RoofusPennymore:
30 out of 60 GB available.
Any chance that you could have built up a lot of swapfiles? They would vanish after a reboot.
If you keep your machine running 24/7 and do memory-intensive work, it's possible to end up with several GB of swapfiles pretty quickly (although 30 GB does sound unlikely).
/mal
"I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you cheer up."
MacBook Pro 15" w/ Mac OS 10.8.2, iPhone 4S & iPad 4th-gen. w/ iOS 6.1.2
     
RoofusPennymore  (op)
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Join Date: Oct 1999
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Oct 22, 2003, 09:20 PM
 
AARRRGGGHHH!!! IT HAPPEND AGAIN! WTF! My keychain is whiped out and all my user prefs are gone. How does this keep happening?!?!?!
---I'm on a low Microsoft diet.
     
   
 
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