Random system prefs loss

[monktus]

I just rebooted my machine (after I accidentally knocked the powercable, its annoyingly loose) and my dock has defaulted to factory settings - all my app shortcuts have dissapeared). My system has been a bit weird recently - my scroll arrows keep defaulting back to the bottom and iTunes has been a nuisance - but this is the firt time this has happened. A couple of times before the dock has moved on its own but hasn't lost everything. I replaced my battery last year and my clock is fine. Any ideas?

Its a bit worrying, osx is usually quite stable. If anyone's come across anything similar, let me know.

Cheers,
Craig

[aaike]

I once got something similar when my virtual memory grew until my disk was completely full... And my father got it after a kernel panic, but I have no clue why this happens. I have to admit that I use cleardock, tinkertools and dockextender to modify the look and the position of the dock (and I also did this on my fathers machine)

[gumse]

I also got a similar problem when I had too little place left on the boot drive. I think it's an error in the way the finder calculates free disc space.
The finder reported about 200 Mb free, but when I tried to copy some files in the terminal I got a "Disc full" message. So when applications are about to quit and try to save their preferences , nothing gets saved. After I freed up some space on the boot drive, this never happened again. From what I can remember now you should have more free space on the disc than you have RAM.

[monktus]

That sounds about right, I have been running out of space on my system partition. Thanks!

[Urbansory]

where are those files stored? Swap files, i have a lot of memory, but my X partition should not be 5 gigs, of which 1.6 gigs is the applications and about 700mb general stuff i stored. Or is about 3 gigs right for X use?

[brains206]

Ahhh...

I guess this is what's happened to me... I have lost months of mail too, after a sleep my laptop didn't wake up, and so I had to do a hard reset... and now I have lost all my settings for everything and the system cannot load the network settings to give it a network back... and guess what... i never took the time to back up the system settings, just my work.

M@

[DeltaMac]

OS X really likes to have a lot of free space on the boot partition, and losing prefs and other system settings is really typical of short space on the partition. Keep at least 10% of total partition space free.