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Alfred lost all settings


cvk

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Hi,

 

Just this morning, I booted to OSX and found out that Alfred defaulted all settings. All shortcuts, workflows, custom themes, etc are gone.

I'm on version 3.1.1 (build 736) with OS X El Capitan v10.11.6.

 

Any ideas to try anything? (I do not keep TimeMachine)

 

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1 hour ago, cvk said:

 

Just local unfortunately.


By default, if you're not syncing with Dropbox, your preferences will be found in your local user directory under:

~/Library/Application Support/Alfred 3/Alfred.alfredpreferences 

 

Alfred doesn't delete/remove settings by himself, so did you use an app cleaner before updating to the latest build? If so, the app may have moved the old preferences in your Trash, thinking you're installing a whole new app. We don't recommend using app cleaners, as they can be over-zealous and delete essential files like these.

 

Let us know how you get on. For future reference, it's most likely worth keeping your preferences synced on Dropbox or your Mac backed up to Time Machine (or a similar automatic incremental backup) so that you don't find yourself without your most valuable data :)

 

Cheers,
Vero

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7 minutes ago, Vero said:


By default, if you're not syncing with Dropbox, your preferences will be found in your local user directory under:

~/Library/Application Support/Alfred 3/Alfred.alfredpreferences 

 

Alfred doesn't delete/remove settings by himself, so did you use an app cleaner before updating to the latest build? If so, the app may have moved the old preferences in your Trash, thinking you're installing a whole new app. We don't recommend using app cleaners, as they can be over-zealous and delete essential files like these.

 

Let us know how you get on. For future reference, it's most likely worth keeping your preferences synced on Dropbox or your Mac backed up to Time Machine (or a similar automatic incremental backup) so that you don't find yourself without your most valuable data :)

 

Cheers,
Vero

 

Hey Vero,

 

Thanks for the reply. I didn't do anything different. Also, there been a couple of days since I've updated Alfred. It just reset today.

 

Oddly enough, in 

~/Library/Application Support/Alfred 3

there are the settings, databases (clipboard data, snippets, etc) and workflows. I guess `Alfred.alfredpreferences ` are the new overwritten settings, but is there any way to restore them and check out?

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cvk If for some reason you do not want to keep your Alfred Preferences in Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or other online backup, there’s another solution for the future. You may crate a launchd process to backup your settings regularly. I’ve prepared one for you. If you run

curl http://launched.zerowidth.com/plists/a5bbea20-608e-0134-2a80-009fd05ce3ca/install | sh

in a terminal. It will do everything for you. Every Monday at 2pm it will make a backup on your Documents directory, with the date. See the generator of that code for more information.

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1 minute ago, vitor said:

cvk If for some reason you do not want to keep your Alfred Preferences in Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or other online backup, there’s another solution for the future. You may crate a launchd process to backup your settings regularly. I’ve prepared one for you. If you run


curl http://launched.zerowidth.com/plists/a5bbea20-608e-0134-2a80-009fd05ce3ca/install | sh

in a terminal. It will do everything for you. Every Monday at 2pm it will make a backup on your Documents directory, with the date. See the generator of that code for more information.

 

Thank you vitor! I'll try Google Drive for sync at first and if that fails I'll try your script too. Thanks for your time!

 

For now I'm trying to re-configure Alfred. Very frustrating. Yet, found myself very surprised on how much I rely to Alfred for my everyday tasks. Amazing!

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  • 1 year later...
On 9/19/2016 at 5:41 AM, Vero said:


By default, if you're not syncing with Dropbox, your preferences will be found in your local user directory under:

~/Library/Application Support/Alfred 3/Alfred.alfredpreferences 

 

Alfred doesn't delete/remove settings by himself, so did you use an app cleaner before updating to the latest build? If so, the app may have moved the old preferences in your Trash, thinking you're installing a whole new app. We don't recommend using app cleaners, as they can be over-zealous and delete essential files like these.

 

Let us know how you get on. For future reference, it's most likely worth keeping your preferences synced on Dropbox or your Mac backed up to Time Machine (or a similar automatic incremental backup) so that you don't find yourself without your most valuable data :)

 

Cheers,
Vero

I am having a similar problem. I had my preferences saved in Documents. Today on boot up my snippets and workflows were gone. The backup folder was still there. I tried moving the folder to Dropbox and then changing the folder location. Alfred recognized it and restarted, but it still did not find the snippets and workflows.

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  • 1 month later...

A few months ago, when I was trying to move Alfred to a new Mac, I was unable to do so -- I tried syncing via Dropbox, but I could not get the new Alfred install to pick up all the preferences I'd created, and nothing I was told on this forum worked. So for those few months my new machine sat unused, as I was too busy with work to invest any more time until things slowed down.  Now I am once again trying to move to a different new machine, took all the forum advice to heed, making sure my preferences were completely synced before installing on the new machine and setting Dropbox on the new machine as the location of my preferences.  Then I copied my Powerpack license and pasted it into my new installed Alfred on the new Mac.  However, when I went to use my old Alfred, it had lost THREE YEARS worth of customization!  GONE!  Now both installs are worthless, since it is the customization that gives them utility.  I'm too drained at this point to deal with Alfred any more -- there have to be similar apps that won't create these kinds of tragedies.  I don't know why I couldn't attach my preferences file to an email, and then paste it into a specific folder where my new installation would find it, i.e., keep it simple. 

 

Anyway, good luck to you RussB, I hope you had better luck than I.

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6 minutes ago, walks0ftly said:

I don't know why I couldn't attach my preferences file to an email

 

It's not a file, it's a folder. You can theoretically send it via email if you zip it first, but it's often far too big: mine is 200MB.

 

As far getting your stuff back, go to the Dropbox website. You can restore old versions from there.

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