Hunting The Muse

OS X corrupted plist

Something pretty annoying happened today with my iBook. Was downloading something that must have been corrupted. Stuffit never quit trying to unstuff it, something got larger and larger, I ran out of disk space, which means I ran out of memory, and my software couldn't quit properly.

Well I guess when the software quits it needs to be able to write its configuration data BACK to disk for reasons I can't fathom, because when I quit my applications and killed the processes and restarted my apps, all their configuration data was gone. No bookmarks in Mozilla, no preferences in iTunes, and Mail.app didn't recognize all the folders I had set up for it before, which for a while had me under the impression that all my mail had been deleted.

That wasn't fun. It doesn't sound like there was a good explanation for the problems manifesting that way, either. I'm open to hearing how I'm wrong. Posted by Curt at January 10, 2003 03:41 AM