Wrong icons in the dock after a restore

I had to use QRecall to restore our server from a backup today, due to an update from OS X 10.4.10 to 10.4.11 that went horribly, horribly wrong. Fortunately, I expected trouble, so immediately before attempting to install the software update, I did a full backup, followed by a verify.

My external backup drive was bootable, with a minimal version of 10.4.10 on it, and the latest copy of QRecall. So, I booted from the backup drive, then used QRecall to restore the internal hard drive.

There were no errors during the restore process, and the system subsequently booted and appears to be running just fine. There was just one minor problem and that was that several of the dock icons were wrong. None of the icons that were in the dock as OS X ships were wrong. The only problem icons were the ones that I had dragged to the dock sometime later.

For instance, I had added Console to the dock. After the restore, the icon still said "Console" when the mouse hovered over it, but it was an Interface Builder NIB icon. Clicking the icon in the dock launched Interface Builder. Control-clicking on the icon and choosing "Show in Finder" showed me a NIB file from somewhere deep in the Developer folder, nowhere near the Console.app.

The problem was easy enough to fix. I just dragged the problem icons off the dock, and then dragged the proper ones back on. I haven't noticed any other problems. Do you have any idea what happened, and why?

-- Bruce

I have no idea what happened. But if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that QRecall captured the Dock's preferences while the file was open and only partially updated. If so, then the restored preferences file was partially corrupt/incomplete. I suspect the Dock preferences and not the Launch Services database, since the application and the replaced dock item have the correct icon.

James Bucanek wrote:I have no idea what happened. But if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that QRecall captured the Dock's preferences while the file was open and only partially updated.

Could be, although I have no idea how that could have happened either. Backups run at 2:00 AM, so that would have been hours after any changes I made to the dock.

I'll chalk it up to a fairly harmless mystery.

-- Bruce

Thinking about the problem a little more, it could have been a race condition between the Launch Services database (which is responsible for keeping track of what icon each application should display) and the Dock starting up.

Launch Services may have some cleaning up to do following a restore. There are all kinds of subtle differences between a system that is captured while it's running and one that has shutdown. If Launch Services was rescanning some applications, it might not have known what the icon for a particular application was immediately after booting. But eventually it would have rescanned everything and been back up to date when you reset the Dock icons.

I'll chalk it up to a fairly harmless mystery.

Works for me.