Today I received my MacBook Air and started installing my favorite applications. Like Keyboard Maestro as number one.
Maybe I'm a bad reader, but once again I made this mistake (which I've made several times before when setting up Keyboard Maestro on new Macs). After installing Keyboard Maestro, I allowed it to sync. There was a warning that I would lose all my macros. But I interpreted this warning as: you'll lose the (default) macros (created by Peter) if you sync with the Keyboard Maestro file in your Dropbox. But it was the other way around. Am I the only one who finds this puzzling or even counterintuitive?
No harm done! I went to my iMac and quit Keyboard Maestro there. Then I restored the Keyboard Maestro file from the TimeMachine. Up and running again.
Perhaps it’s the Dropbox that is causing troubles? Like not really synced? It says it is, but many files are zero bytes.
I've never synced with Keyboard Maestro before, but it seems like you need to start on the Mac with all your macros, initiate the sync to create new sync file (if this hasn't already been done presumably), and then from your new Mac without macros, initiate the sync and open existing and choose the sync file you previously created. If this is the procedure you followed, perhaps the sync file was incomplete before you tried to open it for syncing on the new Mac? Did you possibly accidentally inititate the sync from the new Mac with create new rather than open existing? I don't use Dropbox either, but do I recall correctly that it has issues with real-time syncing? Not sure.
Eek! That does seem like something you should investigate further. Under normal circumstances, it should be the new installation of KM that has its macros replaced:
All of the existing macros on this second Mac will be destroyed when you click the Open Existing button.
Yes, that’s how it should be. But it was the other way around. I tried twice. The macros on the INTEL iMac were replaced with those of the new MBA. I had to restore them on the iMac three times. The third time I copied the macros to another Dropbox folder. Synced that on the MBA. Moved the file to the folder where they should be. Then it was okay. Of course I made sure that Keyboard Maestro was shutdown on both Macs.
You were unsure in your first post, so it's important to start from that understanding of the theory... and then move on to investigating why you have many zero-byte files in Dropbox. Make sure Dropbox is working solidly before adding any further complexity such as KM syncing.
The syncing system in Keyboard Maestro is pretty straight forward, and hopefully the very explicit text when you configure it is clear.
Any change you make to the local macros results in the local sync file being replaced by Keyboard Maestro.
Any change in the local sync file results in the local macros being replaced.
So if you set up a new Mac, and you have set up your syncing service, and you then select Open Existing (which will replace your local macros with the sync file), then your macros on the local Mac will be replaced with those stored in the local sync file.
But if the local sync file is not valid then when it replaces the local macros they will be erased and the defaults will replace them, and when that is then synced back to the local sync file all the macros will be lost (recoverable via the File ➤ Revert to Before Last Sync or other options).
Keyboard Maestro macro syncing relies on the underlying sync technology and if it is not working properly then bad things are going to happen (though generally the revision files that Keyboard Maestro stores should be able to undo most damage).
Surely if Keyboard Maestro opens the file it will get the actual file and not a zero length file otherwise it would not be much use a as a syncing system…?
