Help! My Post-it Notes Have Vanished?

[Maclarny]

Like Milton without his stapler, I am enduring quite a profound sense of loss, here.

My entire dashboard is literally filled with post-it notes. Or was. When I booted my computer, this morning, I discovered that about half of my notes were totally blank. Thinking a reboot might solve the problem and return to me my precious mini memoranda, I promptly restarted. Wrong move.

Having just booted up once more, I returned to my dashboard to find that only two of my yellow friends contained the precious knowledge they once possessed.

What's going on?

 

[spinnerlys]

Look for this file widget-com.apple.widget.stickies.plist under User(you)/Library/Preferences.

The Stickies notes are stored there.

 

[Maclarny]

Just looked at the file. It does not contain any of the missing information. It literally seems to have simply vanished.

Any other ideas?

 

[spinnerlys]

Do you have any kind of backup?

Maybe you could try a software like Data Rescue II, which scans the hard drive for all files, even if they are deleted. It works most of the time, except if they are overwritten at the same physical place on the hard drive.

Otherwise I think they are lost.

 

[Maclarny]

Any idea how this could have happened? I cannot think of any possible catalyst...

 

[vjlab]

The same

Hy guys, I have the same problem, I cant beleave, I've lost a lot of important infos in the postits, the same way. Anyone has discover the solution?????

it could be a viruses????


thanks
vj lab

 

[MacDawg]

it could be a viruses????

Nope, it is not a "viruses"

But if you Google "missing stickies mac" you will find a lot of references to the same phenomena.

Here was one solution... I have no idea if it works or not...

I was able to restore all the stickies by the following process:

1) Log into the system with another administrator account
2) Open a terminal and sudo to root
2) Edit /Users/%user%/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.plist with a text editor (where %user% is the user with the problem)
3) Open /Users/%user%/Library/Preferences/widget-com.apple.widget.stickies.plist
4) For each key in the stickies plist file you will need to copy the key and paste it into the dashboard plist. To do that you need to copy the xml in the dashboard plist and edit it appropriately. Hopefully this is obvious to you how to do it when you get there.
5) Log out and back in as the user with the missing stickies.
6) Check dashboard.. stickies should have returned.

Woof, Woof - Dawg