PLEASE HELP! All my hundreds of macros now gone!

Panicking because I made the stupidest mistake of reinstalling KM when trying to fix the issue of KM engine randomly quitting (when KM editor was still open). So after using CleanMyMac for a “Complete Uninstallation” of the old KM, I reinstalled KM. And now in the new KM I don’t see ANY of my old macros!!! PLEASE HELP!!!

Do you sync your macros with Dropbox or similar?

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My dropbox runs in the background since login…can it automatically sync itself every day? Either way just checked my dropbox and the only KM files in there the latest one was synced last April…:((((((((((

You have to set it up to sync in KM. But hey, April is better than nothing right? And if it turns out they’re gone for good, consider this an opportunity to rewrite improved macros as the need arises. :sweat_smile:

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I dont know if this helps at all but I happened to have plugged my external harddrive for back up not too long before I decided to delete the KM. I dont know how much Time Machine has synced…if not, the last time I had a Time Machine backup was definitely more recent than last April. Time Machine would’ve automatically backed it up right?

All of your macros are stored in one file:
~/Library/Application Support/Keyboard Maestro/Keyboard Maestro Macros.plist

Most likely this file now contains ONLY the macros you have created since your clean reinstall of KM.

But you can search the Time Machine backup for this file.

Also, KM normally maintains prior versions of this file that you can restore to KM. To check, in the KM Editor menu, goto
File > Revert Macros >

and you should see something like this:

image

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I hope my above post will help you, but for future reference:

We all learn the most from our mistakes.

To be clear, your mistake here was in not backing up your KM macros BEFORE using a tool like "CleanMyMac", or any of the third party App uninstallers (like AppDelete).

These tools are designed to delete every file you have related to the App you want to delete.

BTW, that reminds me, have you checked your Mac Trash? It is possible that the Keyboard Maestro Macros.plist file from your prior KM install is still in the trash. If so, you could just restore it.

For the future, you could also set up a KM sync file in a folder in your DropBox folder. I do this and it works quite well.

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There are .plist files from different dates in my Time Machine that I would like to try restore each to see whether or not it contains the original macros. But how do I revert to a plist with date that’s not listed?? Thank you so much!!!

I am reading your post here but still a bit confused....

But where is the “KM sync folder”??? when I click “File> Reveal Macro Sync File”, Finder just shows me whatever file is already open in Finder window.

Quit Keyboard Maestro and Keyboard Maestro Engine, and use Time Machine to restore the Keyboard Maestro Macros.plist file in the ~/Library/Application Support/Keyboard Maestro folder.

You can get to ~/Library in the Finder by holding down the shift (or option) key and selecting Library from the Go menu in the Finder.

Generally I would choose the latest and/or largest of the Keyboard Maestro Macros.plist files.

My recommendation is never to use CleanMyMac, or any other “cleaning” tool, and definitely not with Keyboard Maestro.

My other recommendation is always to have good complete backups, at least weekly, preferably stored off-site.

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Get Carbon Copy Cloner and a couple of hard drives bigger than you Mac’s drive. And just alternate them every weekend.

I love CCC because you can actually boot to the back up drive and install software and see if you like it or not. If you like it, install it on your Mac drive. If you don’t just do another backup (from your Mac drive of course)

I have no affiliation other than being a super-satisfied and paid user for 6 years.

Time machine is fine if you only need to restore a file or two, but if you want to restore your whole system or a whole folder or even just one file, CCC is great.

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This may be way too late, you either have it solved or have moved on, but dropbox keeps replaced versions of files, and deleted files, so that may be an alternative solution to your problem.

https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/recover-older-versions