Trial Expiration Data Wipe?!

Loved your product so much after the trial period, I purchased it. Here’s the problem - I spent a fair amount of time setting up the environment during my trial, which was wiped at trial expiration - now I have to start all over.

Cool tool, but not cool that I have to start all over. I recommend keeping app preferences at trial expiration so that upon purchase and registration, new users don’t have to rebuild the wheel.

Hi, that’s strange, it isn’t designed to reset the user data in any way.

If you change your desktop layouts then the app assignments can be deleted (because they are associated with desktops that no longer exist - each desktop has a unique id). But without changing the grid by adding or removing desktops, all the setup should remain the same.

I’m sorry you had this experience, I don’t know what caused it.

I had a similar experience with losing a configuration. I did the trial and got it all set up under my Mac user ID the way I wanted it to the point that it felt enough like the old Spaces experience that I bought a license a few days later and registered it before the 14-day trial period was over.

I proceeded to set up TS2 for my wife under her user ID with custom backgrounds and application assignments for each of the eight desktop spaces I set up for her so that she could easily differentiate them and mentally compartmentalize her work, not realizing that the registration I had done under my ID was not Mac-wide, and so, for her ID, I was still using the trial license. We discovered this when the 14-day trial expired and the set up work that I had done for her was all gone. Once I figured out what happened, I registered TS2 under her ID and had to repeat much of the set up work I had already done.

I agree with KillerDesigner, that was not cool.

The only way I think this could happen is that the number of desktops was reduced and then increased again.
Custom backgrounds and app assignments are maintained by OS X itself, although TotalSpaces2 provides an interface to the latter.
But anyway, it sounds like an unfortunate experience, and I’ll try to think if there’s anything we could do to avoid such a circumstance. (Hmm - I do have a small plugin app that saves desktop configurations including app assignments and backgrounds, and it might be possible to incorporate this into TotalSpaces).

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

The number of desktops had not changed; my wife and I both use 2 x 4 grids and our configs are mostly the same except for background pictures. I wouldn’t have noticed any lost config because I just use the default background, whereas she likes a different picture for each desktop (I just look at the menu bar icon if I forget which desktop I’m in).

Sequence of events was:

  1. I download the trial, set up my TS2 config, then log out.
  2. She logs in, sets up her TS2 config, then logs out.
  3. I log in, buy the TS2 license, register it under my ID, not realizing that it was only user-level and not a Mac-wide registration.
  4. I use the machine for some x-number of days, i.e., several logout/login sequences.
  5. Some x-number of days after the trial has expired, she logs in, gets the “trial has expired” notice and all desktops have reverted to the default Wave background.
  6. We register TS2 under her ID, she re-configures TS2, we both login & logout a couple of times, everything seems to be copacetic.

I poked around a little under ~/. and ~//Library to see if there was something I could backup in case this happens again but I couldn’t find where TS2 or desktop configs are stored, so that plugin you mentioned sounds like it could be useful.

Despite the lost config problem, I really do like having the old Spaces concept back that some twit at Apple decided to take away. Thanks again!