OS X crashed and all my pref's are gone

mmmpiemmmpie
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
OS X crashed ( doing a find in the finder ).

Now my prefs are missing.

The killer is mail, which says that no accounts are setup, would I like to setup a new one.

Also safari lost its prefs.

Fire lost some, it still knows about my accounts, but thought it was the first time Id run it, and had forgotten all the window settings.

Aquisition seems ok.



The weird bit is that there are still files in my library. In particular all my account info and mailboxes are still there.



Ive run Disk Utility and repaired the permissions, but that didnt help.



Someone else must have encountered this before. How did you fix it?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    paulpaul Posts: 5,278member
    you ran out of disk space, eh?

    nothing you can do really... although the only thing you should have lost was preferences that, while time consuming and annoying, can be restored...



    i have no idea why this happens... but it does and it is really annoying... (i think it happened 3 times with me... )
  • Reply 2 of 5
    ibrowseibrowse Posts: 1,749member
    A while ago I had a problem where none of my preferences would stay, I'd set them and as soon as I'd close the window they'd be gone. Try emptying the Cache folders in /Library/ and your user name/Library/, it worked for my somewhat related problem.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    mmmpiemmmpie Posts: 628member
    As it happens, I had run out of disk space.

    This is an absolutely killer bug.

    Im running on a 20gig iBook, and dong some iMovie stuff.

    Importing a single tape will pretty much use up all of the available space.

    Its completely unbelievable that I then loss all of my settings. You might think that these are minor problems. But stuff like my old email account settings are going to be really hard to find again.



    Whats worse is that the only warning I had was that safari couldnt download files ( with a cryptic error ), and there was 200mb free on the disk. So it wasnt obvious that not having any space was a problem.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    overhopeoverhope Posts: 1,123member
    It's been inherent in Unix for as long as I can remember...
  • Reply 5 of 5
    mmmpiemmmpie Posts: 628member
    Whats been inherent?

    That if you run out of space open files get deleted?

    Its not appropriate behaviour for a consumer system.

    At the very least a few meg should be reserved for saving prefs files.

    But better than that, the system should tell you when you log on that you're out of space, and if you dont make some then you wont be able to make any changes.

    ---AND---

    open files should stay just the way they were
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