Question

I’m trying to implement a backup of my application’s data and user preferences (stored in NSUserDefaults) as email attachments with option to restore them at a later date.

I’ve got the process working fine for my application data file simply by attaching the contents of the file to the email, but can’t work out how to do the equivalent for the user preferences. The Root.plist in the Settings bundle contains only the template for the settings interface and none of the current settings.

Reading the settings into my own plist and saving that to the documents directory is an option but seems inelegant and overly complicated. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

I wouldn’t go looking for the plist that stores NSUserDefaults, because it’s not directly exposed by the API, and hence is an implementation detail that could be changed at any time.

Instead,

[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] dictionaryRepresentation]

will give you an NSDictionary containing all the key-value pairs that your app has stored.