All Cameras Disappeared!!!
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.