How to Recover Your Stickies Widget Info After MobileMe Loses it

If you’ve got a Mac and you’re a MobileMe user, be cautious to sync your Dashboard Widgets with the service. Well, I did, trying to sync my widgets along my Macs, which resulted into all of my stickies wigdets to appear blank! I use stickies a lot (the widget, not the Stickies app) when in need of taking quick notes, i.e. telephones, passwords, things to do, even my next great idea, so seeing them all empty wasn’t nice at all.

Here’s how you can restore the information, provided that you do have a backup of your computer’s files. Luckily, my recently bought TimeMachine could save the day.

1. Open up a Finder window, click on your username and then go to Library/Preferences/
2. Locate the file named “widget-com.apple.widget.stickies.plist“
3. Replace this file with the corresponding file from from your back, either by entering TimeMachine or manually
4. If this problem occured by syncing your Dashboard Widgets with MobileMe, enter the MobileMe preference pane in the System Preferences application and deselect the Dashboard Widgets from the Sync pane.
5. Log out of your account, and then log in again. Your stickies should be populated again with all the precious data you’ve stored in them.

Remember to keep a backup copy of this file in case you’re using the Stickies widget to store any information that you can’t afford to lose.