[Solved] Moved my Alfred Preferences to my Dropbox folder and lost custom searches, workflows, and themes

[Chris Messina]

Today I switched the location of my Alfred Preferences to ~/Dropbox/Alfred. I had previously synced my preferences with Dropbox and somehow (I don't know when) Alfred moved its prefs back to ~/Library/Application Support. After I restarted Alfred with the new preferences location, it appears that I've lost many custom searches, themes, and workflows. 

 

It seems like those missing items aren't totally gone, but I don't know how to safely merge my local prefs with my synced prefs. 

 

I currently have Alfred, Alfred 2, and Alfred 3 directories in ~/Library Application Support. The Alfred directory is the one that still has my custom searches, workflows, and themes. 

 

Suggestions on how to remedy this situation (get my settings back while also use Dropbox for syncing)? 

 

Alfred version & build number: Alfred 4.1.1 (Build 1172)

OS X version: macOS v10.15.6 (19G2021)

Edited September 16, 2020 by chris
Change to title

[Chris Messina]

Ok, chalk this up to... "working as intended" but "not as expected". 

 

I must have had an older set of preferences previously synced to ~/Dropbox/Alfred, and those pre-existing preferences took precedent over my more recent preferences. 

 

Anyway, I moved my preferences location back to ~/Application Support/Alfred, deleted the Alfred folder in ~/Dropbox (and emptied my trash), and then once again moved my prefs to ~/Dropbox, but this time to a clean directory. 

 

Everything transferred successfully! 😅

[Vero]

@chris When you first picked a spot in Dropbox, did it say "Alfred will use these existing preferences" or "Alfred's preferences will be copied to this folder"?

 

We try to make the difference between using a pre-existing set of preferences that was already present, and copying your existing preferences to the new location abundantly clear in this process, so that if you select an existing set of preferences, it doesn't get overwritten.  

 

Glad you're all sorted though.

 

Cheers,
Vero