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Restoring preferences


Ryan Kilgore

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Hi all,

 

My hard disk finally died on my 12" PowerBook G4 a week ago. I had been doing online backups through a service called Mozy of my most important files, which included "User/Library/Preferences/Accordance Preferences" and "Documents/Accordance files." I put a new hard drive in last week and did a clean install of OS X Tiger. I then installed Accordance and all of my misc. modules from their various CD's, upgraded Accordance, and copied over the Accordance Preferences folder (and Accordance files folder), and started up Accordance.

 

What I get first of all is an error that pops up saying, "The name "Module Installation Log" cannot be used, since it is used by a different type of file." I click OK, then get a similar error saying, ""The name "General" cannot be used, since it is used by a different type of file." Then Accordance exits. Renaming (or deleting) these two preference folders results in Accordance opening, but without any of my preferences (which I'm trying to avoid since I spent about 3+ hours organizing all of my modules).

 

I've deduced that the problem is that the preference files I've restored from my backups aren't containing the correct metadata (or it's just not recognized by the system), and aren't interpreted as actually being Accordance preference files. The ones from the backup are shown with a blank document icon and list "Document" under Kind in the "Get Info" window. The ones Accordance creates if I remove or rename these files have the proper icon and list "com.OakTree.Accordance.settings" for Kind.

 

The strange thing is that other documents I've restored from the backup (either by using Mozy's client software or by downloading a .dmg that I can have created on their website) list the correct file types and open with the appropriate Applications. Or at least after I've installed the corresponding Applications...

 

I might note also that the other files in "User/Documents/Accordance files" such as my user notes and user tools are not recognized either, and Accordance won't open them.

 

I can email Mozy to see if the problem is with the backup, but can anybody offer any suggestions on why I might be running into this problem and what I might try to resolve it? Recreating my preferences is going to be a pain (but possible), but recreating my user notes and tools if I can't get those back will be much more difficult.

 

Thanks for the help!!!

 

Blessings,

Ryan Kilgore

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My hard disk finally died on my 12" PowerBook G4 a week ago. I had been doing online backups through a service called Mozy of my most important files, which included "User/Library/Preferences/Accordance Preferences" and "Documents/Accordance files." I put a new hard drive in last week and did a clean...

 

Ryan,

You are brave using beta software to backup your files. I'd contact tech support at Mozy. It appears to me that the resource data fork of some of your files were not handled correctly.

 

This is from the Mozy website:

We

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Hi Ryan,

 

Other users have lost meta data (file types) during backups...

 

Lost File Types after backup

 

One of the forums resident experts wrote a nice little AppleScript to help recover Accordance File types {Post 7}. (BTW, I also use SuperDuper for my backup software)

 

Also...

 

1. The file 'Module Installation Log' is a simple text file that can be recovered by loading into TextEdit and resaved.

 

2. You can also use your 'Accordance Preferences' folder (from User/Library/Preferences/) as the "MAIN" preferences (the preference folder in the same folder as the Application (in 'Accordance folder'). On MacOSX, Accordance uses these preferences as a Master Copy for all other users of Accordance. So, once you get your library copy recovered (fix file types), then replace the "MAIN" one too.

 

Let us know how it goes.

 

Mike

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Mick,

 

You're right. Using Mozy apparently wasn't the best idea. I had investigated backup solutions previously and had been using AASync, but it required a lot of fiddling and didn't do all the backups automatically and so I found that I was inconsistent in using it. Mozy was free and easy, and was better than nothing, but it didn't come through for me in this case. The nice thing about it though was that it can do quick backups frequently, so I had a backup from about 2 hours prior to my hard drive crashing. No work was lost from having to resort to the previous day's backup.

 

 

Mike,

 

Thanks for the link to that thread. I hadn't been able to find it when I was searching the forums, but when I read it after following your link, I recalled having seen in back in March. Joe's tool worked perfectly, and all of my settings and user notes and tools and everything else are back and working! Wo0t!

 

I'll have to check out that SuperDuper. Or at least until I get the MacBook I've been saving up for after Leopard is released. Time Machine looks awesome.

 

 

Blessings to you both,

 

Ryan

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