Since upgrading to Leopard (and thus upgrading to the newest version of Safari), I’ve had the unfortunate problem of Safari throwing all my cookies right out the window.

Every 4-6 weeks I’d fire up Safari only to realize that all logins to various sites were lost, making me either go through each site’s password-retrieval system or try to dig through Wallet to try and find it.

The bug doesn’t seem to have a real “fix” but there is something you can do to solve the problem easily each time it happens (assuming you use Time Machine).

1. If you’re currently running Safari, be sure to quit before proceeding.
2. In Finder, navigate to ~/Library/Cookies. There will most likely only be one file in the folder, which is named Cookies.plist.
3. With that Finder window open, launch Time Machine and go “back in time” to the last time you used Safari and had functioning cookies. Select the Cookies.plist file and Restore it.
4. Once the file has been restored, relaunch Safari and your previous, working set of cookies should now be functional.

Each time this happens, be sure to submit the bug to Apple by going to the Safari menu and clicking on “Report Bugs to Apple…”. They read them and the more people send in about bugs, the sooner those bugs will get fixed.

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