Keep losing changes to macros

Questions & Suggestions
1

I’ve hesitated to post this for a few months now thinking it was OE (operator error).
And it still could be …
I’m losing changes that are made to macros.
Not all of them, just some of them (it seems)
I’ll make a change to a macro and use that macro and it works fine.
But then a day or two later I’ll go to use that macro and the new change I made is not there.
This has happened more than 15-20 times and I have no idea what is causing it.
There are 3 cpus in the office, I’m the only one that modifies macros.
There is only 1 ‘sync’ file in a dropbox location that all 3 computers look at.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

OS 10.13.3
KM now 8.2, but it was doing it under 8.1.x also

2

First, make sure you check to see that you aren’t accidentally opening KM7. I had this problem and it was because I hadn’t deleted it.

3

Thank you for the suggestion.
I have only 1 local version, but did have 2 older versions on an external drive that I have now deleted.

  • The login item on startup is the local correct version though.
4

It does sound like a sync issue. Do all the Macs have a permanent network connection and Dropbox syncing all the time?

If you notice you have lost a macro, you can try reverting to “Before the Last Sync”. Copy the macro and then revert back and paste it in. But that doesn’t explain why the issue might happen.

As usual, you can check the logs for any reported issues (Engine.log and Editor.log since both are involved).

5

Yes all the macs have a permanent connection and dropbox.
There is one laptop that when closed will loose it’s connection and then when opened it has to re-establish the connection. Might that do it?

6

It shouldn't, unless you open the Mac and make a macro change before the Dropbox sync/Keyboard Maestro sync has completed - which you could certainly do, but you'd have to do it relatively quickly I think.

You should be able to do some simple tests, make sure Keyboard Maestro editor is displaying the list of macros in the same macro group in each location, and change the name of a macro group and see how long it takes for the others to all change.

Remember too if there is upstream network issues (eg slow general Internet connection or the like), then that will make for slow Dropbox syncing which could be part of the issue.

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7

Fwiw, I had this happen with only my desktop and laptop sync’d. Unsyncing and resyncing resolved it for the time being. I don’t know why it happened, nor why it was resolved. I did no further trouble-shooting except to verify the syncing similarly to the tests Peter describes elsewhere in this thread.

1 Like
8

Had this happen to me two times already. After the first time i’ve set up the automatic Git snapshots using Hazel.

The second time was just now:

  1. I’ve disabled Hazel so it won’t create any new snapshots as I reverted to old versions of Keyboard Maestro Macros.kmsync using git reset
  2. I’ve tried git reset --hard on a couple revisions from today and yesterday
  3. Nothing was changing in the Keyboard Maestro interface (it was open the entire time)
  4. Then I quit it, re-reset to the yesterday’s snapshot one more time, re-opened it and it got all my recent changes

I have Keyboard Maestro on three Macs now, and the Keyboard Maestro app is always running on all of them as I’m keeping tinkering the macros. It seems that on one Mac it didn’t get the updated file from the Dropbox (even though the local Hazel installation noticed it and did a git snapshot) and kept displaying old data.