# where is the .plist of the dock located?



## alexandr (Aug 31, 2004)

my disc got to full earlier today, and the finder quit working. i was left pretty much with noe response from most apps, and had to make a forced turn-off. as i got back in my dockprefs is missing. is there any way to resume my old settings, although it seems the dock couldn't write to the disk because of the overload. more prefs may have been turned back to default, but for now i will be happy if i can get my dock back to "normal".

as i got back in, the machine had gotten rid of whatever 3GB wich was holding space before i turned off, so finder is now working as normal again.

where do i find the .plist of the dock, and what do i do to make it be the current one?

.alex


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## perfessor101 (Aug 31, 2004)

alexandr said:
			
		

> as i got back in, the machine had gotten rid of whatever 3GB wich was holding space before i turned off, so finder is now working as normal again.
> 
> where do i find the .plist of the dock, and what do i do to make it be the current one?


Your Dock preferences are in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist where ~/ is Unix shorthand for your home folder. Once you restarted and the Dock came up, a new .plist was created automatically. You simply have to drag the items you want and drop them on the Dock.

Are you aware that when the free disk space on an Mac OS (Extended) drive falls below 15% you are in significant danger of irreparable file system damage? You need to free up a lot of disk space quickly. Depending on several factors OS X can quickly use up 3 GB of disk space in swapfiles, log files, archived log files, _etc_, all of which are invisible files. If your Mac is not awake 24x7 you need to get something like Cocktail or Onyx and run it at least weekly to clean out the various OS X files that accumulate.

Actually it sounds as if it is time for you to invest in a larger HD.


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## Giaguara (Sep 1, 2004)

How big is your hard drive, alex? 20 GB? How much free do you have in it?


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## alexandr (Sep 1, 2004)

it is almost 28GB. right now i have about 3,5GB left, which i guess its a bit sparse..

as for buying a second harddrive, i've been thinking of that a long time now. finally a kinda got down to buying a 40GB iPod, and using it kinda 30% music, the rest for leftover mediafiles. would this be a good idea, meaning; is there any difference between the iPod as an external harddrive compared to the ones which are just that(apart from the size issue, in most cases)??

alex


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## perfessor101 (Sep 1, 2004)

You should never have less than 4.2 GB of free space on a 28 GB hard drive. There is a long technical explanation of why if you are interested, but you do need to fee up more disk space. Some more conservative users  would say you should keep at least 5.6 GB (20%) free to allow for all the OS X invisible files, swapfiles, _etc_.

A lot of people use their iPod as a backup drive and to transport files from one system to another and have no problems. Personally that would make me a bit nervous. Your iPod is subject to rougher use than any HD, internal or external, and over the years I have had to "reset" my G1 iPod several times which results in loss of all data on the drive. On the other hand, my rather ancient firewire drive has soldiered on running 24x7 for years without a glitch. This is not a criticism of the iPod, I love my G1 and wish I could justify a new 40 GB mode or even a mini like my wife's.


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