MacOS – Notification settings aren’t being retained

macosnotifications

After upgrading an iMac and MacBook Air from Mavericks to Yosemite, changes to Notifications aren't being retained:

  • Looking at the Notifications Preference Pane – there are a set of apps with Notification settings.
  • Changing Notification settings for any of these apps works – ie I can change the alert style, whether notifications appear in Notification Center, etc.
    • These settings are respected until I reboot / logout, at which point they revert back the original settings.
    • New apps will appear in the preference pane when they are run. Notification settings can be changed. After rebooting, the app disappears from the notification preference pane until I run it again, at which point it appears with default settings.

So what seems to be happening is that these settings aren't being saved to disk. I have:

  • repaired permissions
  • deleted the ~/Library/Application Support/NotificationCenter folder

None of this had made any difference. Does anyone know where these settings are stored?

Best Answer

Fixed:

This thread on the Apple forums is the key:

  • Open the Library folder in your Home folder.
  • In the Library folder, open the Application Support folder.
  • Locate the folder named NotificationCenter. Drag this folder to the desktop.
  • Next, open the Terminal application and enter the following

.

cd `getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR`
rm -rf com.apple.notificationcenter 
killall usernoted; killall NotificationCenter
  • Restart your computer.

The issue is clearly to do with the NotificationCenter database. There are 3 files:

  • db
  • db-shm
  • db.wal

In my case db.wal was a 0 byte file compared with 1.9MB on a correctly working Yosemite install. Permissions were correctly set, but looks as if Yosemite wasn't writing to it. Only deleting db.wal didn't fix the problem - another 0 byte file was created on restart. Deleting everything works though!

Related Question