Hi all. Here's a curly problem that Apple support hasn't been able to solve...
So I've lost my Keychain contents, Firefox logins, system preferences, and other app data such as Beyond Compare sessions. I don't appear to have lost any documents at first glance.
Some background:
New Mac Mini 2014 with fresh install of Sierra.
Has been running fine for a month or so since migrating from the old Air.
Last night Firefox crashed and restarted, having created a new profile and pointed profile.ini to it.
I pointed profile.ini to the old profile, which reproduced my tabs, but all passwords and add-ons were lost.
I restarted the machine this morning to find the UI settings (launcher icon size, etc), startup apps, and hot corners all back at factory.
The oldest file in ~/Library/Keychain is 10:58pm yesterday. Somehow the original was destroyed or deleted.
If that were all the info you had where would you start? What would you look for in the system logs?
Some more background which may or may not be relevant:
I have two external drives, one was the original 1TB Mac Mini drive which I used under a new user for a while before swapping it for an SSD, installing a fresh Sierra, and migrating files from the Air.
I had copied [user]/Library from 1TB to a 160GB then deleted everything off the 1TB, but had an issue where some folders couldn't be removed from Trash -- something about file system protection prevented it so I formatted the 1TB without a hitch. Great... problem solved I thought...
The 160GB drive had [user]/Library and some other bits which I deleted after deciding there was nothing there I needed.
Trouble appears to have started after this. I deleted the 160GB drive files from within a folder compare session in Beyond Compare. I considered the possibility that I may have accidentally deleted the wrong side (ie the running Mac Mini system), but the problem with that theory is that I would have deleted the entire Library contents had I done so, including Firefox profile etc., not just the Keychain contents.
I'm rather at a loss from here. My documents seem safe, so my goal is to find out what happened so it doesn't happen again if I have a choice in the matter!
Where would you start?
Edits: clarity
So I've lost my Keychain contents, Firefox logins, system preferences, and other app data such as Beyond Compare sessions. I don't appear to have lost any documents at first glance.
Some background:
New Mac Mini 2014 with fresh install of Sierra.
Has been running fine for a month or so since migrating from the old Air.
Last night Firefox crashed and restarted, having created a new profile and pointed profile.ini to it.
I pointed profile.ini to the old profile, which reproduced my tabs, but all passwords and add-ons were lost.
I restarted the machine this morning to find the UI settings (launcher icon size, etc), startup apps, and hot corners all back at factory.
The oldest file in ~/Library/Keychain is 10:58pm yesterday. Somehow the original was destroyed or deleted.
If that were all the info you had where would you start? What would you look for in the system logs?
Some more background which may or may not be relevant:
I have two external drives, one was the original 1TB Mac Mini drive which I used under a new user for a while before swapping it for an SSD, installing a fresh Sierra, and migrating files from the Air.
I had copied [user]/Library from 1TB to a 160GB then deleted everything off the 1TB, but had an issue where some folders couldn't be removed from Trash -- something about file system protection prevented it so I formatted the 1TB without a hitch. Great... problem solved I thought...
The 160GB drive had [user]/Library and some other bits which I deleted after deciding there was nothing there I needed.
Trouble appears to have started after this. I deleted the 160GB drive files from within a folder compare session in Beyond Compare. I considered the possibility that I may have accidentally deleted the wrong side (ie the running Mac Mini system), but the problem with that theory is that I would have deleted the entire Library contents had I done so, including Firefox profile etc., not just the Keychain contents.
I'm rather at a loss from here. My documents seem safe, so my goal is to find out what happened so it doesn't happen again if I have a choice in the matter!
Where would you start?
Edits: clarity
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