Question about restoring with synced folder

[jdouge]

Wiped and reinstalled my iMac. I have my old folder "Alfred" with all of my customizations in my Dropbox. To re-set my "new" installation of Alfred to those preferences do I simply press the "set to sync folder" button in the Advanced tab in Alfred Preferences and point to that folder? I am concerned this would overwrite my old preferences with the generic data in my new "Alfred 2" folder on my hard drive.

 

Then I was going to overwrite the data in the new "Alfred 2" preferences with the data from my old "Alfred" preferences, but the folders have very different subfolders and files, and that caused my some confusion.

 

I am sure there is a quick and obvious answer to this, but I don't want to make a mistake i can't recover from!

 

Thanks

[Vero]

Wiped and reinstalled my iMac. I have my old folder "Alfred" with all of my customizations in my Dropbox. To re-set my "new" installation of Alfred to those preferences do I simply press the "set to sync folder" button in the Advanced tab in Alfred Preferences and point to that folder? I am concerned this would overwrite my old preferences with the generic data in my new "Alfred 2" folder on my hard drive.

 

Then I was going to overwrite the data in the new "Alfred 2" preferences with the data from my old "Alfred" preferences, but the folders have very different subfolders and files, and that caused my some confusion.

 

I am sure there is a quick and obvious answer to this, but I don't want to make a mistake i can't recover from!

 

Thanks

 

 

What does your older Alfred folder on Dropbox contain? If i contains folders like "clipboard", "themes", etc these are your older Alfred version 1 settings. If it contains a single file called Alfred.alfredpreferences, then these are indeed your v2 settings.

 

Once you know where your v2 settings are, your Dropbox folder is fully synchronised (no spinning arrows), you can go into Alfred's Advanced preferences and select that Dropbox folder to use on your new Mac.

 

More details about syncing here:

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/advanced/sync/

 

Cheers,

Vero

[jdouge]

OK thank you for the quick response! -- the Alfred folder in my Dropbox contained all of the old folders AND the Alfred.alfredpreferences file. I left everything alone, so Dopbox did not need to update. Then I went to the Advanced tab and set that folder as the sync folder. Alfred restarted, but did not import my old preferences.

 

What should I try next?

[jdouge]

Tried one thing: I just went into Time Machine and restored the Alfred.alfredpreferences file, restarted Alfred and . . . still preferences are not reflected when I restart Alfred.

[Vero]

Tried one thing: I just went into Time Machine and restored the Alfred.alfredpreferences file, restarted Alfred and . . . still preferences are not reflected when I restart Alfred.

 

 

Are you certain that you were syncing your settings, recently before reinstalling your Mac? It's possible that the Dropbox file is older and that in more recent times, you were just saving your settings in the default location.

 

Take a look in Time Machine under 

~/Library/Application Support/Alfred 2/ where you'll find the Alfred.alfredpreferences file 

 

Given you have access to Time Machine, you'll no doubt be able to find the last file you used for your settings