Alfred Preferences Disappearing from iCloud Drive

[NickNY]

Hi, this is the second time this has happened and I am getting really frustrated with it.

 

Yesterday while using Alfred, everything was working fine, until I went to add a snippet and noticed none of my existing snippets were loading for some reason. But my snippet auto-expansion was still working ok. So I figured there had to be some 'interference', or one of the other 10 things used as an excuse when the software doesn't work properly.  So I rebooted to reset everything. Except now not only do the preferences not show up, they are now not even working at all.  I tried loading my Alfred preferences file manually from my iCloud, but I noticed it was now zero bytes. 

 

I have my preferences synced to iCloud, (which was probably my first mistake after reading up here, but that is USELESS INFORMATION AFTER THE FACT), but either way this should not have happened. Totally losing my entire collection of snips, preferences, workflows and everything else that has been built up over months time is just unacceptable no matter what. If Alfred knows it is so unreliable, or it knows that iCloud is that unreliable, don't allow people to store things there, or keep an extra backup of the preferences stored somewhere. 

 

No I don't keep time machine backups, especially of random application config files of a few hundred kb,  give me a break.   

 

So these preferences are pretty much gone again right? 

[vitor]

1. Go to iCloud’s website and login.
2. Go to Settings.
3. Scroll to the bottom.
4. Click “Restore Files” (bottom left).
   

There’s no guarantee it’ll work, but it’s worth a try.

---

Regarding the rest of your message, I understand your frustration but lashing out is not the best way to seek resolution. You’re only making people less willing to help. None of the volunteers on these forums come here eager with the prospect of being yelled at.

Your point is mostly nonsensical. By your logic, maybe macOS should not let you do anything because you might screw up. For some people iCloud Drive is reliable; for others it’s not. From your description, we don’t even know where the fault lies. For all we know there might be something else on your system causing the problem, which is incredibly common.

From someone who provides support for free as a volunteer, both here and on major open-source projects, messages like yours are part of the reason maintainers burn out. You could very well have said everything you just did with a different tone. You could’ve made a feature suggestion instead: “always keep a copy of the preferences when syncing to cloud backup”.

Again, I understand your frustration, but you’ve apparently made the same mistake twice and didn’t even report anything the first time. Maybe if you did, there’d have been a fix to prevent the second time.

 

When making a bug report or asking for help, always remember there are people on the other side of your text.

[Andrew]

@NickNY I've also replied to your Facebook messages earlier today, did you also try turning off Optimised Storage for iCloud as per this article:

 

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207236

 

This may also bring your files back from iCloud.

 

I take on board that iCloud Drive is getting more unreliable (especially for Pro apps), and I have raised an internal ticket to provide more warning when trying to use it to store Alfred's preferences.

 

Cheers,

Andrew