Reboot causes number of spaces to converge on monitor 1

I am experiencing a similar problem.

Every time I reboot, all of the previous spaces have gone to 1 monitor with a new single space on the 2nd monitor. For example, if I have 9 spaces on the 1st monitor and 4 on the 2nd one, when I reboot it will be 13 on the 1st one and 1 on the 2nd. If I immediately restart it will be 14 on the 1st and 1on the 2nd, and so on. Thus I have to reset the layout every time I boot the computer. It seemed to start when I upgraded to Mavericks 10.9.3.

I thought the problem might have to do with the fact that my monitors are the same monitor, but the replyā€™s about would seem to rule that out.

@scottrickman I donā€™t know why this happens - looks like some kind of bug in the way osx keeps the spaces assigned to a particular screen. But I have not been able to reproduce it, so Iā€™m not sure exactly how it happens.

I wrote this app to try to assist: http://downloads.binaryage.com/DisplaySpacesManager-1.0.2.zip

It uses the TS2 API to record desktop settings, and to subsequently restore desktops to their intended screens. Does it help your situation?

It doesā€™t seem to have much effect.
I saved when I was in the 9&4 config. I restarted. I checked the config after restart with TS. Then loaded DSM and restored. DSM had no effect on the config.
The only change was that during 1 of the restarts (I tried it a couple of times), instead of changing from the 9&4 to a 13&1, it started changing from a 9&4 to a 10&1.
The last output from DSM was:

From the look of it, the spaces that existed when the config was saved have completely ceased to exist by the time of the attempted restore.

Thatā€™s not what I was expecting based on the previous info in this thread.

If the spaces just get lost, then TotalSpaces2 will need to save all the meta information too, such as desktop background settings and app assignments so that it can re-create the spaces.

I managed to fix the problem on my computer. I had to do a complete reinstall of the operating system due to my boss breaking it at work, and the spaces started staying where they needed to be without me having to manually rearrange them.

I think the issue may have to do with computers that have upgraded to a new os without doing a complete reinstall. Does everyone who is having this issue fall into that category?

My computer was acting a tad weird at times too, so I did a complete Mavericks re-install and didnā€™t restore settings but re-installed all applications. Having done that, it seemed to have no positive effect on the spaces whatsoever. They sometimes just disappear. I have 2 major events happening now, after setting up 12 spaces across 3 monitors (so 4 spaces each):

  1. When I use just the laptop screen I mostly have 11 spaces left, not the expected 12. This happens very often.
  2. When go to my 3-monitor setup I get 11 spaces on the middle screen (NOT my laptop screen, but the one where I put the menu bar) and 1 space on my other 2 screens. Very very weird.

Because Iā€™ve been so busy I havenā€™t tested the tool to restore spaces settings yet, but I do believe spaces are actually going missing so that must indeed mean we need things like desktop background etc saved as well.

Stephen, could you again talk me through what I need to install to test the re-installation of spaces thingy? Since the re-install I think I miss several things to make that work.

Thanks,
Jan

Hi Jan, I think I somehow missed this post earlier, sorry for the delay.

I have 2 screens, and I find that the 1st space on my external screen never migrates to my laptop when I unplug the external screen. So I get 11 spaces on my laptop (after having 9 (laptop) + 3 (external)).

Given this, I would expect you to get just 10 spaces on your laptop with the others unplugged. So this is the first odd thing.

Second, I would expect the spaces to migrate correctly back to their original displays (like they do for me - I get 9 + 3 again when I plug the external screen in). So thatā€™s the second odd thing.

I havenā€™t got to the bottom of this. My displays spaces manager works for some people (from here: http://downloads.binaryage.com/DisplaySpacesManager-1.0.2.zip ). But it doesnā€™t create or delete spaces, it only moves them to the correct monitors. Does it help you with your current setup?

Hi Stephen, Iā€™ll test the tool. Thanks for giving me the link for downloading.
In the meantime, I did some more testing. I now installed Yosemite Dev preview 3 and tried to see if anything was different. Just so you knowā€¦ it seems to all be the same. The problems have not changed as far as I can tell for now.
I will keep you posted on the progress with the tool.
Regards,
Jan

Some more bad news (which I caused myself by going to Yosemite I suppose).
The tool doesnā€™t show saved configs, so I cannot restore to one. Iā€™m not sure if it saves anything, but it sure doesā€™t show any saved configs. Any ideas on this one?

Itā€™s broken in Yosemite, I need to issue an update for that. Please wait a little.

This should work.

http://downloads.binaryage.com/DisplaySpacesManager-1.0.3.zip

It does work. Iā€™ll be testing it for a while now.

Tested it. Set up my three monitors again, 4 spaces each (one is the laptop screen). I made a backup of the config with DisplaySpacesManager. Turned the laptop off, restarted it without monitors and had 11 spaces left (so one less). Then I reconnected the monitors; Laptop screen had 1 space, one monitor (the ā€˜mainā€™ one with the menubar) had 8 spaces and the last one had four. So weirdly enough, now I had 1 more than the original 12.
Then I ran DisplaySpacesManager again to try and restore what I started out with. That didnā€™t work out. If I read the log correctly, 4 spaces were moved and 2 moves failed. I think one of the issues must be that MacOS actually deletes spaces that later canā€™t be recognized by your tool.
What I feel I need here is the correct number of spaces per screen and the correct app assignments to the right space. If this canā€™t be done, I do understand. If it can but you need me to test specificsā€¦ tell me what to test :slight_smile:

Slightly OT - Iā€™ve just made a feature request that I think could be relevant to the issues you all are dealing with:

Today, I had the same thing happen again. The laptop only showed 10 spaces out of the original 12. Iā€™m quite sure MacOS is happy deleting spaces. I also understand that totalspaces cannot move spaces that are not there anymore. So the problem is spaces moving and disappearing.
Having said all that, I think ggroccaā€™s feature request makes a lot of sense. That would actually be the ideal solution I think.

Any chance of this little utility being updated to allow removal of old configurations.
Still having spaces getting mangled between random reboots and even this app sometimes doesnā€™t properly restoreā€¦ Hence I have to regularly reset it up and save the config again. It does work some times so is usefullā€¦ But would be good to get rid of the long list of old configs that appear broken.
Cheers.

Yes, I intend to do that. You can delete them manually from ~/.ts2_spaces_configs using a text editor, but this is a bit annoying to do.

For anyone still following this thread, I have made a much better new version of DisplaySpacesManager that is able to add and delete spaces. It attempts to restore the configuration you saved, including app bindings and desktop backgrounds.

I have been using it ok for a few days, I think itā€™s ready to be tested externally.

http://downloads.binaryage.com/DisplaySpacesManager-1.1.0.zip

It will only work with this pre-release version of TotalSpaces2, which needs to be installed first:

http://downloads.binaryage.com/TotalSpaces2-2.2.18.dmg

Any previously stored configurations from earlier versions wonā€™t work as the save format is different.

Tested with Yosemite only. And reminder: you need to have a license for TotalSpaces2 for this to work at all (trial version wonā€™t work).

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This is happening to me, I love this software and just purchased it. But I spent a ton of time setting everything up only to loose all that work on a reboot. This seems to be long time running issue, is there no fix in site?

@khofmeyer yes I am trying to help those that work with multiple monitors, and I have made the tool above that helps to save and restore spaces configurations. If you are able to try it, I would appreciate any feedback.