NetNewsWire 6.0.2 macOS confused after restoring from a backup

[glessard]

I had to restore my main machine (Big Sur 11.4) from a Time Machine backup, and since then NetNewsWire is very confused.

Note that NNW still runs perfectly fine on my other devices, so the problem seems to be about a bad cache, or some similar thing.

I can't find a way to make it reload everything from the network, so NNW has become unusable on this machine. (I did try deleting it and reinstalling, but that doesn't clean up anything.)

[vincode-io]

What kind of account are you using?

[glessard]

I have one Feedly and one iCloud account. Both are confused.

The other two devices that connect to these accounts (another Mac, an iPhone) agree with each other about what's visible; the copy of NNW at issue can't even agree with itself. When I try to read something from one of the few feeds that seem to have articles, it generally disappears from the feeds list and nothing is displayed as an article. But that's not consistent either.

[vincode-io]

Have you tried deleting the accounts and adding them again?

[glessard]

I did, and that did not help. Note that I could fix the problem by erasing the NNW data under ~/Library/Containers/, but that should never be necessary.

[szegedi]

I also experienced this exact same problem (NNW shows no entries even after refreshing feeds) after reinstalling the machine from a TM backup, and @glessard's fix worked for me too (and nothing else did, including the instructions for "factory reset", or exporting/deleting/importing subscriptions.)

I have no accounts, all my subscriptions are in the "On My Mac" section, so it seems to affect local-only subscriptions too. Also the problem persists on 6.0.3. Just my 2c.

Huge thanks to @glessard for the workaround! NNW is such an essential piece of my everyday news acquisition that this handicapped me badly for few days. Now to catch up with all the webcomics… I mean, news.

[vincode-io]

Did no entries show up or no new entries? Were your feeds there?

[glessard]

In my case, the feeds seemed to be there, but no article would successfully get fetched.

[vincode-io]

Could you read previously fetched articles?

[glessard]

Well, yes, otherwise I would have given up on NNW long before I had to restore from a backup!

[szegedi]

Did no entries show up or no new entries? Were your feeds there?

The feeds were there, and NNW said it was refreshing them, and for a moment there'd be unread count badges next to few of them, but then they'd disappear and throughout all this, there'd be no articles I could read, either new or old.

[vincode-io]

I've been looking into this and haven't been able to recreate the problems described here. I tested by removing the NetNewsWire container from ~/Library/Containers and restoring from Time Machine.

What I observed was that the sync Accounts wouldn't stay in sync. iCloud was especially bad and the restored account had a couple thousand too many articles in it. I also tested BazQux and it ended up missing a handful of articles in the restored account.

I didn't have any problems pulling new articles in any of the accounts I tested which were On My Mac, iCloud, and BazQux. The problem must happen when you do a full Time Machine restore of the entire device, so I'll try and test that next.

[vincode-io]

Just thinking out loud here...

If we have to delete the entire NetNewsWire container in ~/Library/Containers to resolve the issue, then the problem must be in some data stored outside of our Accounts folder. Besides, I already tried deleting and restoring individual Accounts using Time Machine and that worked fine.

UserDefaults is the only thing I can think of that would fit that would be stored by NetNewsWire outside of the Accounts folder, but I can't see that we store anything in UserDefaults that would cause refresh problems.