Databases Overwritten on Start

[byamabe]

I'm on 3.7 and all my databases are being overwritten on startup and I'm losing my snippets, clipboard, workflows, etc. I did just install 10.14.1. Anyone else experiencing something similar? I do have my databases backed up so that's something. Does anyone know where the workflows are stored? I would have a really hard time recreating those.

 

One more thing, I also lost my preferences in general. My Alfred HotKey, File Search settings, etc. were also lost

Edited November 3, 2018 by byamabe
Addition lost application data

[Vero]

@byamabe Welcome to the forum!

 

Could you please let me know whether you're syncing your preferences, and if so what service you're using?  If you're using a service other than Dropbox, and the Preferences files aren't available immediately on startup, Alfred will assume there are no preferences and create a new set of (blank) preferences.

 

Make sure that your preferences are stored directly on your Mac (e.g. either un-synced on your primary drive, or synced using something like Dropbox where files are stored as standard files on your Mac), and not on an external drive or mounted cloud-based service that needs to be loaded after startup.

 

More details here on syncing:

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

 

Cheers,
Vero

[byamabe]

I checked and Alfred.alfredpreferences was in iCloud Drive. Thanks for the document. I don't remember ever setting this, but didn't know not to set it there.

 

Sadly, I moved Alfred.alfredpreferences to ~/Library/Application Support/Alfred 3 and the same thing happened. My only real concern is that all my Snippets and Workflows are gone.. I can see what looks like them in the old databases (using Visual Studio Code), but then after I restart Alfred they are overwritten in the file.

[Vero]

@byamabe If you go to a Time Machine backup pre-dating your iCloud issues, grab your Alfred.alfredpreferences from there, which will contain all your snippets and workflows.

 

If you take a look at the iCloud instructions on the page I provided earlier, you may also be able to recover them by disabling iCloud's Optimised Storage feature, which tries to decide which files should remain locally available for you and which ones should just be stored in the cloud, which causes havoc for apps that require local always-available files.

 

Once you've recovered your preferences, please use a reliable service like Dropbox.

 

Cheers,
Vero

[Andrew]

@byamabe it's worth adding that if you are referring to the snippets.alfdb database being overwritten at startup, this isn't where the snippets are sourced from. They are sourced from inside the Alfred.alfredpreferences package, and the snippets.alfdb database is a temporary store which is created for Alfred to access the snippets more efficiently.