Single Blog Entry

Recover Lost NetNewsWire Subscriptions

So I like to live my life on the edge and have about 3 GB of free space on my hard drive. I was running Windows XP in Parallels virtualization and designing using Photoshop CS4, so it was using quite a bit of disk swap space. Eventually, my computer slowed to a standstill and OS X warned me I had 0 KB left on my startup disk.

One side-effect of this was that my .plist preferences file for NetNewsWire was corrupted. So when I launched up NetNewsWire after resuscitating my computer, and all 335 of my subscriptions were GONE.

Luckily, I found instructions on how to recover lost my subscription list. The developers of NetNewsWire are amazing and set up an automatic backup functionality that backs up your subscriptions each time you change the subscription list:

  • Close NetNewsWire
  • Go to ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/ and delete the Subscriptions.plist file
  • Open the Backups/ folder, and you will see a list of your subscription files with backup dates.
  • Copy the latest one back into the NetNewsWire/ folder, and rename it to Subscriptions.plist
  • Restart NetNewsWire and your subscriptions should be recovered.
  • Anonymous
    Thank you!
  • THANK YOU!!!! Worked great!
  • C
    Hello, since NewsNetWire is now run through Google Reader, it has replaced my old subscriptions with my very old and completely different set of Google Reader subs, deleting 2 years worth of NNW subs in the process. I noticed the NNW backups folder — it's in 'plist'. I noticed that to update my Reader/NNW subs, it needs to be in OPML. I cannot figure out how to convert plist to OPML. Would you have any ideas? Thanks in advance.
  • Jim Smart
    thanks - i too had a zero-kb disk problem and lost my feeds - your post saved me a lot of bother :)
  • karl
    Thank you! You saved me a lot time.
  • rvdh
    Beautiful! I panicked for a second when I launched my NetNewsWire a few minutes ago but a quick search on google pointed me to your post and everything is a-ok now! Thanks!
  • James
    Thank you for posting this! Major relief.
  • Flora D. Martinez
    hi thanks for posting this.
    I just had the same problem, but I'm running version 3 and unluckily there isn't any subfolder in the application Support one..
    do you know if they have removed the back up option?
    cheers
  • Are you checking in your user Library folder for the NetNewsWire Application Support folder (vs. System library)? In other words, try doing this: In Finder, go to the "Go" menu and click on "Go to folder..." (Shift-Cmd-G), and type in "~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/" and press enter. It should take you directly to the correct folder. Let me know if this works.
  • Thanks. Accidentally deleted an entire category of feeds. Your post saved me. Thanks!
  • thanks for the writeup, the same thing just happened to me but was able to recover the feeds.
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