Text replacements lost after upgrading to Yosemite

If you updated from Mavericks and still have a bootable version or a Time Machine backup; then, those are stored in /Users/username/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences NSUserDictionaryReplacementItems. Copy it from those to the same place in your Yosemite installation. You can make hidden files visible by running this command in the Terminal app:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 1

once you've replaced the file, then this hides hidden files:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 0

27" i7 iMac (Mid 2011) refurb, OS X Yo (10.10), Mavs, ML & SL, G4 450 MP w/10.5 & 9.2.2

I have the same issue - all my text replacements are gone.. It looks like it is because the key that these are stored under has changed to the key above.

However, adding items to this plist item does not seem to take - I can see that the new items are in this key, but the UI is still showing an empty list. A reboot is also clearing the list in the plist.

Any ideas on how to restore my text replacements?

optimumprime wrote:

However, adding items to this plist item does not seem to take

You have to be careful when modifying the plist file. Use something like Property List Editor or in Mavericks and later, PlistBuddy. See How do I add to this plist? | Apple Support Communities for starters.

If anyone is ever looking for a solution to this issue that will persist the replacements across reboots, etc. You need to update the plist as well as the sqlite db as described here. This works perfectly.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/124048/where-is-the-replace-with-list-s tored

I had this problem too after installing 10.10 or 10.10.1. Guess what? As soon as I turned on iCloud Drive, my text replacements came back! A bug perhaps; I suspect those young whipper snapper programmers only test for one nest case scenario. It never occurs to them that some of us might not want to enable iCloud Drive for a few days! I guessed this, because not even the default replacements were in the list.

Interesting; I am having a similar problem. All my text substitutions had disappeared after upgrading to 10.10.1.

When I turned off iCloud Drive then turned it on again, one default entry then appeared: OMW On My Way! but not the rest of the usual fractions etc.

This has to be a bug of some sort but one that only affects certain users as it is clearly not a universal problem...

I should have added that the "fix" for the Macs did not occur until I enabled iCloud Drive for all my devices. The iOS devices' "fix" occurred after the last iOS device was enabled for iCloud Drive—before it was enabled on the Macs.

Also I waited for more than four hours before I checked the last, the second Mac. Maybe this syncing is very slow as well as problematic!

So maybe, since Text Replacements are synced across all four of my devices, the sync doesn't work right (perhaps a bug or incomplete implementation) until after all are enabled for iCloud Drive. Bizarre to say the least!

I just lost all my Text Replacements after upgrading to El Capitan!

Same. What's really strange, is it happened many days, and many restarts after having installed it. I installed El Cap two weeks ago, and I used my text replacements multiple times yesterday, and today I noticed they're gone. So it's not the installation itself that caused it.

Same problem here. Honestly, I hate computing these days. It's a disaster compared to the highly functional, reliable software I grew up using (also made by Apple).

FWIW, I filed a Radar and Apple is quite actively asking for multiple diagnosticy things to figure it out.

Hmm. I just installed 10.11.1 and my replacements are back? Or the installer simply re-added some default ones? Unsure. At any rate, I now have replacements that weren't there yesterday, but were before they all spontaneously disappeared a few weeks ago.

Good to know. Thanks