Q: Text replacement / keyboard shortcuts gone after iOS 10
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Sep 15, 2016 12:54 PMby TekkieDan,This is so annoying! I have had the same thing happen each time I upgraded phones too. I have an iPhone 6S+. After upgrading from a 5 to a 6 then to the 6S+ I spoke at length with Apple Tech Support about having lost all shortcuts/text replacements. They had never heard of the problem all though the forums were full of the same issue!
Apple, please resolve this. FINALLY!
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Sep 18, 2016 9:46 AMby Appanage,What almost always works for me:
In macOS
1. Highlight all text substitutions in System Preferences > Keyboard > Text
2. Drag them to the desktop, resulting in the creation of a file called Text Substitutions.plist
3. Make sure they're all still highlighted in the window and delete them
4. Wait 30 seconds or so
5. Drag the Text Substitutions.plist file into the window, adding them all
On your iOS device:
Hold down both Home and Power buttons until the phone starts reboot with the Apple symbol appearing. Give them a little time (maybe 30 seconds or so). They should appear.
As always, YMMV and I'm not responsible for any of your results, good or bad.
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Sep 19, 2016 8:21 AMby Matthew110607,Signing out of iCloud and Drive and rebooting the phone resulted in the "omw" shortcut coming back and the deleting of five "essential" shortcuts I had made in the interim. It eventually restored my five "new" shortcuts that I had created after this problem began, but not the other 995 or so shortcuts I had made prior to upgrading to iOS 10.
So that says to me that somehow upgrading just wiped them off of iCloud for some reason. It's also VERY clear that the issue is iCloud-based, not locally backed up or anything based as initially suggested.
Sure would love a way to get back my 1,000 or so shortcuts so I don't have to manually enter them again, but if it restored five new ones, that's probably a good indication that the old ones are gone.
This happened to me when I moved to iOS 9 as well. But not on incremental updates like 9.1, 9.2, etc. And then again on 10.
I'm hesitant to redo all my shortcuts only to have them disappear when I get my new iPhone 7 next week though...so I'd love it if someone could solve this problem.
I wonder if I could trigger the transfer from iCloud to the phone using an old backup. There is a file called CloudUserDictionary.sqlite located under iPhone/System Files/Keyboard Domain/CoreData/Mobile/User Dictionary/D5555ds;aljkfd;lfj/store
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Sep 19, 2016 8:27 AMby Appanage,I'm not so sure the old ones are "gone", though effectively they might be if there's no device that'll sync with them. I've had Macs that either continued to have all of them and/or continued to sync with the "old" shortcuts while one or more iOS devices weren't synching with them but were successfully syncing amongst themselves.
My standard practice has been to regularly drag them from macOS to a backup folder just in case, particularly when new OSes are released.
Regardless it's definitely a nasty bug and a massive PITA that needs far more attention than it's been given. If I wasn't running loads of Macs and iOS devices I'd've lost mine to whatever wormhole they appear to remain in many times after I upgrade a device.
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Sep 19, 2016 11:15 AMby Appanage,It appears to be something to this effect. I'm unsure if there's a "sync upgrade trigger" of some sort that's supposed to move previous replacements to a new folder or new format on version upgrade but it appears that what's old isn't lost and what's new will at least partially sync to other devices – I just haven't been able to take the time to try out all the scenarios.
This appears to jibe with the "export/import" drag and drop out of and back into the macOS Keyboard text replacement window on an upgraded macOS box.
I honestly have no idea what I would have done if I didn't have all mine on a previous OS version macOS box. I've had this happen to me three times now, and that's what saved my bacon.
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Sep 19, 2016 11:19 AMby Matthew110607,Unfortunately I don't have a Mac anymore (work stuff doesn't function on a Mac, and got tired of dual booting etc - the Mac wasn't so awesome to make it worth it for me). My wife still has a Mac, however.
She doesn't really use the App Store or anything on there...so this time, when I manually re-enter all my crap on my iPhone, can you walk me through how to sync it to her Mac and then back it up, and sync it back to my phone so I have it saved?
