My Own Macros Disappeared

A few days ago an extensive list of my own macros have disappeared -- now the Macro Editor shows only the generic set that come with the app. I haven't knowingly disabled them, don't know where I would find them.

You may be able to recover them using the The Revert Macros command in the File menu.

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Just pick a date when you think all of your Macros were in place.

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This used to occasionally happen to me, but now it's much worse. In the last couple of days I've lost whole macro groups and trying to keep track of the newly changed macros and the groups they were in is becoming very difficult. Is there a reason this is happening so often?

It should never happen. If it is happening at all, something is definitely wrong on your system.

The most likely cause is you are syncing your macros and the sync system you are using is misbehaving.

The only other cases that are even vaguely plausible are that you have some "cleaner" software that is destroying your macro files, or you have some out of control macro that is operating within the Keyboard Maestro editor.

Peter, thanks for the reply.

I'm using iCloud to sync and I have no trouble going back to restore the backed-up files that are there. There are 209 kmsync files going back to the beginning of 2018 and it shows over 80 GB of space available on iCloud.

Not using any cleaner software.

Not sure about any rogue macros that could cause this, but I'll be on the lookout.

I have had bad results with iCloud generally. I've heard various reports of iCloud sync files taking days to sync.

My guess is that you are making changes in one place, and the sync file is not syncing, and then making changes in another place, and then those changes end up overwriting the first changes.

Do you recommend Dropbox instead of iCloud or are there other alternatives? What would be the process for switching from one syncing method to another? I am syncing between three macs.

I never tired Dropbox but I had nothing but problems with iCloud KM syncing. It seems like iCloud worked great for a long time and then I started noticing macro changes were being rolled back and I had missing macros. Since I mostly create macros on my primary Mac I started using one-way sync and have not and a problem since. Minor hassle. If I do make a macro change, I now manually export the macro to a iCloud folder then when I'm back at the primary machine I import the macro there. The macro that I used is in this thread.

How do you setup a one-way sync? By only changing macros on one machine?

Pretty much anything else. Dropbox or OneDrive are fine as far as I am aware. At least I have never heard any reports of similar problems.

That said, Apple has forced all the syncing provided to switch to a new system in recent years, so I have no idea how that might affect things.

As far as how you switch, simply turn off syncing on both Macs, choose one to be definitive, start syncing on that Mac and save the file to the new sync service, and then when it appears on the other Mac (which hopefully is promptly, otherwise you are going to have problems), start syncing on the other Mac, opening the file and replacing its macros.