App settings will not persist on macOS 14

[scottrobertson]

I have been trying to work out why my app settings are all resetting, and not persisting in macOS 14. This has been happening for apps such as Raycast, iTerm, Rectangle, Bartender etc. I just tried running mackup uninstall and everything is fixed. And then when i run mackup backup again, none of my settings will persist or save again. Any ideas?

[joshmedeski]

Which files storage method are you using? Can you share your ~/.mackup.cfg with us?

[scottrobertson]

[storage]
engine = icloud

[applications_to_ignore]
oh-my-zsh
espanso

iCloud

[joshmedeski]

I've seen other mackup users using iCloud have has similar issues. Could you try turning off the feature to optimize mac storage and see if that helps? It will be under the iCloud settings.

My thinking is iCloud is removing these config files from your hard drive to save storage.

[scottrobertson]

Hey. Just tried that, and it did not help, sadly.

I also did the following:

• mackup uninstall
• Open an app, all settings are fine
• Rename/remove ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Mackup
• Run mackup backup
• Reopen the same app, and it has reset all settings
• mackup uninstall
• Reopen the app, and all the settings are back

[joshmedeski]

Can you confirm the symbolic links that are generated are valid? The Rename/remove step you mentioned could be causing the symbolic links to break.

@lra any ideas?

[scottrobertson]

To be clear, I had already run mackup uninstall before the rename/remove. I ran that earlier today to get things working. I did the rename/remove just to basically do a "fresh start" to rule out any old files causing issues etc.

[scottrobertson]

Hey. Just an update here. I just tried this again using

[storage]
engine = file_system
path = Mackup/

And i get the same result. I run mackup backup, open iTerm2 for example, and all settings have wiped, run mackup uninstall and open it again, and settings are back. So i don't think iCloud is the issue.

[codechenx]

I have same issue

[ahmadawais]

Same issue. Started happening when I updated to Dropbox beta, and then tried moving to iCloud. Now it's a mess. Not sure what's wrong, unable to predict a pattern here but with latest macOS this happens:

• All of a sudden some apps loose their config (have to reconfigure)
• Some apps like iTerm2 or Terminal don't keep their configs no matter what I do (uninstall/install fresh doesn't help)

[Skowt]

+1 on this issue. I was going to say I wonder if this is related to the Apple update that basically made it harder for Cloud apps to work on mac. It also meant you had to change the location of your Dropbox drive.

https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes

[scottrobertson]

+1 on this issue. I was going to say I wonder if this is related to the Apple update that basically made it harder for Cloud apps to work on mac. It also meant you had to change the location of your Dropbox drive.

https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes

I don’t think it’s that, no. It even stops working if I just use the file system storage method.

[Skowt]

Then I would say it's a recent Apple update. For me this started happening in the last week, which is when I updated to Ventura 13.4.1 (might've also been when I updated to 13.4).

It's possible that there's an unknown bug with the latest update or a "security improvement" that's messing with symlinks 🤔

[Skowt]

I've done mackup uninstall for now which has fixed everything but it would be interesting if mackup has any logs stored somewhere? To see exactly what was erroring out. Perhaps a permissions issue that was going undetected? Who knows at this point.

[luispedrofonseca]

Just lost a couple days on this exact issue because it took me a while to figure why a lot of my settings weren't saving and that mackup was the culprit. Hope this gets solved quickly.

[jagajaga]

cc me