it doesn't happen enough to warrant additional preparations, I was just hoping there was something I could do on the rare now and then that it happens, besides cuss and mumble about having no idea what just went POOF
Since Virtual isn't sufficiently motivated by the problem to back up
the specific file which holds the desired information, he may not want to bother locating and navigating through a Time Machine backup and restoring the file in question, assuming a Time Machine backup is available.
Plus, in my experimenting (OS X 10.5.8), restoring a saved copy of
com.apple.dock.plist, then running
killall Dock, failed to restore the poofed application to the relaunched Dock. (Same with
com.apple.dock.db.) So, if a logout/login or restart are required, that makes restoring a backed-up plist even more time-consuming.
How about scripting the production of a simple list of the Dock's contents, requiring just a double-click at the beginning of a session? A comparison of the list, in the rare instance it was required, with the extant Dock should make it easy to identify the
poofee.
Parsing the XML and extracting the item names shouldn't be too tough; I might even try it myself.
