About Big Sur and preferences/videos disappearing (fixed in Big Sur Beta9)

[glouel]

Please note that there is a bug currently in Big Sur betas with screen saver containers that will make you "lose" your settings and videos after install. They may (very likely) still be there though as there's a bit of a path mismatch currently.

If you are a terminal person, those are the paths in various versions of MacOS for the Container:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine.legacyScreenSaver <- Catalina, Big Sur beta 1/2
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine.legacyScreenSaver.x86_64 <- Big Sur Beta 3 on x86
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine.legacyScreenSaver.x86-64 <- Big Sur Beta 4/5 on x86

Inside that path, you can find Data/Library/Application Support/Aerial for where Aerial stores the videos. Please move that to whatever version you are running above.

So to recap full path of beta 4/5 : ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine.legacyScreenSaver.x86-64/Data/Library/Application Support/Aerial

For preferences, look at Data/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.JohnCoates.Aerial.{UUID}.plist

(where UUID is a random list of letters and numbers)

Again the correct location in beta4/5 is `~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine.legacyScreenSaver.x86-64/Data/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.JohnCoates.Aerial.{UUID}.plist

If you are a finder person, it's a bit more complex. You may not see this if you didn't install beta3, but the new paths will look like this, instead of what you see in terminal :

Look for the most recent one that ends with x86_64. Yes they are named the same, and this is very different than the paths you see in Terminal.

As you've guessed, this is a macOS with the screen saver container mechanism in Big Sur beta. Please feel free to file a bug in macOS's Feedback Assistant to get more traction to the issue and hopefully get it fixed !

Please also be aware that I've seen the screensaver container lose the focus on playback, and pressing the keyboard will not exit/beep, and you'll be able to actually move your mouse pointer above the screensaver. As of right now I don't have a workaround for that issue in code, but should you find yourself in that situation, press cmd+option+shift+esc to force quit the container. This will launch another screensaver which you'll be able to exit.

[glouel]

So please be aware, this bug is finally fixed in beta9 🍾🎉 🥖

That means that after install, it will look like you've lost your videos/settings, you can move them back.

Old location : ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine.legacyScreenSaver.x86-64/Data/Library/Application Support/Aerial

New location : ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine.legacyScreenSaver/Data/Library/Application Support/Aerial