Something corrupted my mail preferences this morning. Luckily I didn’t lose anything, partly because of a backup and partly because the application behaved well after crashing. I did lose all my filtering rules, four months of learned junk mail filtering and the record of which messages had already been downloaded from the server. After restoring my prefs and restarting mail, it proceeded to download almost 800 messages, most of which had already been read, responded to and filed. So there went my morning.
If you’re using OS X, back up the Library folder in your Home folder. Just take the whole thing and throw it on a CD if it will fit. Do this regularly. If it wont fit, start by backing up the following folders in your user library:
- Application Support
- Preferences
- Keychains (all stored passwords are in here)
- Addresses (all the Address Book stuff)
- Calendars (if you’re using iCal)
Depending on which browser you’re using, these are the locations of their various bookmark files:
- Safari:
~/Library/Safari - Chimera:
~/Library/Application Support/Chimera - Explorer:
~/Library/Preferences/Explorer - Phoenix:
~/Library/Phoenix - Mozilla:
~/Library/Mozilla - Opera:
~/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences
OS X is really good but it’s still a long way from perfect.
