Hosts not migrated via brew upgrade

[JJJ]

Hi there. I updated via Homebrew and my Local, Folder, and Group entries are gone.

Contents of ~/Library/Logs/net.oldj.switchhosts/SwitchHosts.log is boring:

[2026-05-25][01:45:35][tauri_plugin_updater::updater][ERROR] failed to check for updates: error sending request for url (https://github.com/oldj/SwitchHosts/releases/latest/download/latest.json)
[2026-05-25][01:45:35][switchhosts_lib::commands][INFO] automatic update check failed: error sending request for url (https://github.com/oldj/SwitchHosts/releases/latest/download/latest.json)

My /etc/hosts still has this:

# --- SWITCHHOSTS_CONTENT_START ---

...and a few hosts I had enabled are in there, but all of the disabled ones are gone.

I did a little bit of AI assisted troubleshooting, and have come to the conclusion that my old SwitchHosts data was likely destroyed via brew cleanup.

[oldj]

Could you please check whether there is any content in the ~/.SwitchHosts/v4 directory?

Normally, when v5 is run for the first time, it should migrate the old data and move the original data to this directory as a backup.

[JJJ]

Hey thanks for the quick response and support 👋

tree revealed this file structure:

└── migration-1779673533
    ├── archive-metadata.json
    └── config
        └── dict
            └── cfg.json

archive-metadata.json

{
  "archived_at_ms": 1779673533083,
  "format": "switchhosts-archive-metadata",
  "mode": "rename_or_copy",
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "sources": [
    {
      "label": "config",
      "source_path": "/Users/jjj/.SwitchHosts/config"
    }
  ]
}

cfg.json:

{
  "left_panel_show": true,
  "left_panel_width": 270,
  "use_system_window_frame": false,
  "write_mode": "append",
  "history_limit": 50,
  "locale": "en",
  "theme": "dark",
  "choice_mode": 2,
  "show_title_on_tray": false,
  "hide_at_launch": true,
  "send_usage_data": false,
  "cmd_after_hosts_apply": "",
  "remove_duplicate_records": false,
  "hide_dock_icon": true,
  "use_proxy": false,
  "proxy_protocol": "http",
  "proxy_host": "",
  "proxy_port": 0,
  "http_api_on": false,
  "http_api_only_local": true,
  "tray_mini_window": true,
  "multi_chose_folder_switch_all": false,
  "env": "PROD"
}

[oldj]

It does look like some files are missing. Under normal circumstances, there should also be a data folder inside migration-1779673533, and the previous hosts files should be located in data/collection/hosts/data.

Sorry about this. I’m not sure yet whether the issue was caused by the migration process or by Homebrew, but I’ll look into the migration code.

Also, in the future, whenever your data changes significantly, you can click the gear icon in the lower-left corner and use Export to back up your data.

[JJJ]

No worries. Best of luck figuring it out.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do on my end that is helpful.