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All Cameras Disappeared!!!

edited August 2017 in SecuritySpy
I've been happily using Security Spy for years...

Occasionally Security Spy crashes and I have to restart the computer. This happened this morning so I tried to restart the computer, I had to force quit Security Spy then I could restart the computer. Right before I restarted I noticed Security Spy had restarted itself but showed a window with no cameras, I thought that was odd but restarted the computer anyway. Well turns out Security Spy has lost all my camera configurations, is there anyway to get them back?

In fact it looks to have lost all settings, the web server is gone as well.

Running Security Spy 4.1.6 on a Mac Mini (Late 2012) 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 with 16GB RAM running OS 10.11.6

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Paul

Comments

  • Easiest would be to recover the security spy preferences from a backup drive. Connect your backup drive and navigate to the hidden library folder of your user account. Normally you could go to the library by holding the option key and "go" menu of finder, but because the backup drive is NOT the active boot volume, that won't work.

    To work around that, "Go to Folder" in finder, and let finder help type in a location.

    1. Navigate on the backup drive into "Users". One of the listed items is your home user folder.
    2. "Go to Folder" in finder. Once the dialog box appears, be sure the text box is empty. Drag your user home folder into the text box. That will give you something like...

    /Volumes/myBackupDrive/Users/myUserName

    type the following at the end of that address

    /Library/Preferences

    That makes the destination..

    /Volumes/myBackupDrive/Users/myUserName/Library/Preferences

    What will open is your preferences folder on the backup drive.

    Retrieve the "SecuritySpy Preferences vNN" file from the backup
    (vNN where NN is a version number) You want the highest number one.

    Quit Security Spy if you have not already.

    Copy the retrieved SecuritySpy Preferences vNN file into your active user preferences folder. THAT is accessed by holding down option while selecting "Go" in Finder.

    Restart SS and your retrieved settings should get you back to where you were.

  • BTW, it is a good idea to keep a backup copy of the SecuritySpy Preferences file independently of your main drive backup. Makes for a convenient way to restore your SS settings in case something goes awry. Just quit SS, replace the bad preferences with a good copy and restart SS.

  • edited August 2017
    Heh, that would be great if I had a backup drive :) Best look into that.

    Well I started recreating everything from scratch but the preferences panel was acting weird and I couldn't get the web server to work, even on the same machine. I would click apply preferences and instead of the button staying grayed out it would briefly go gray then come back as active like I made another change but hadn't. So I decided to remove the v74 preference file from my preferences and duplicated the v72 file and renamed it to v74. Voila, everything was back again!

    Just to be sure I made a small change to the preferences and it worked as expected.

    Am I playing with fire by renaming the v72 preference to v74 and using it? Is there a way to backup your settings? Seems like there used to be a way.

    Thanks to guykuo, he looks to have the best solution, I just need to attach a backup drive! I essentially did what guykuo suggested but with an older prefs file.
  • Are the version numbers on the preference files associated with the version of Security Spy or are they just periodically incremented as a means of preferences backup? I ask because my v72 preference had a creation date of 7/23/2017 but the last time security spy had an update I think was 6/22/2017 and the v74 had a creation date of today.
  • Thanks again for the help and suggestions guykuo!
  • I think SS is smart enough to grab and convert an older preference file. The number seems to increment with each release, but isn't identical to the SS version number.

    If SS fires up and doesn't find the current preference file, it seems to import from an older version that it finds in the preferences folder. I don't know how far back in preference versions it will accept.

    I just copy the preferences file to another location to keep an extra. Thats copy, not move!
  • I can strongly recommend SuperDuper for making bootable clones of your main drive. If you pay the small registration fee, it does subsequent backups in a fraction of the time of the initial clone by use of "smart backup." That writes just additions and changes to the clone so the system doesn't have to waste time rewriting stuff that is already there. The result is identical to a full copy, but super fast.

    The resultant clone drive is bootable and gets you back up and and running with all your system and SS settings. Just boot from the clone, erase your main partition, then clone the clone back onto the main partition.

  • edited August 2017
    Have you solved this problem? Because I have the same
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