Hi
can I make sure that a USB volume with the Recall archive is mounted before trying to access it?

The archive sits on a USB3 drive connected to a Mac mini. The Mac mini is in the same Wifi as my laptop which is the computer that is to be backed up. The idea behind this is that capture actions are running on the laptop, but all the maintenance action (merge, verify etc) are carried out on the Mac mini and are thus much faster than via Wifi.

Currently I have to make sure that the USB drive is accessible and I would like to automate this step, every thing less to worry about (or forget!) is good for backups.

Thanks

Prion,

I'm assuming that the USB volume on the Mini is physically connected all the time, but not mounted all of the time (for whatever reason).

The QRecall scheduler running on the Mini should auto-mount the local USB drive before any scheduled action is started.

And, the QRecall scheduler running on the laptop should auto-login to a remote server volume before staring its capture.

However, if the USB drive on the Mini (the server) isn't mounted, a remote QRecall (the laptop) can't force that volume to mount on the server.

So that's the bad news. The good news is that there are still potential solutions.

Since QRecall on the Mini should auto-mount any physically connected device before an action runs, you could simply schedule an action that runs on the Mini to occur about the same time as the backup from the laptop. For example, if the laptop capture runs every night at 20:00, you could schedule a merge action on the Mini to run every night at 19:59. (A merge with nothing to do will complete within a few seconds, but has the side effect that the volume it mounts is still mounted a minute later when the laptop needs it.

For that solution to work, you'll want to uncheck the "Unmount volumes mounted by actions" scheduler option on the Mini.

A more "elegant" (read "nerdy") solution would be to attach a prolog script to the capture action that would use ssh to execute a script on the Mini that would mount the volume. This would require a script on the server to identify the device that the volume is associated with and use the diskutil command to mount it. You'd also have to set up ssh to connect to the Mini without a password (by generating and installing a public/private key pair).

Hi James

neat, I had not thought of that. I'll try this hack and report back. Thanks for the suggestion!

I am watching the situation carefully but amazingly (or perhaps expectedly) it seems to work just like it should.
Thank you, helpful as ever!

uncheck the "Unmount volumes mounted by actions" scheduler option on the Mini doesn't seem to work

gipiy wrote:uncheck the "Unmount volumes mounted by actions" scheduler option on the Mini doesn't seem to work

If you've unchecked this option, but the volume continues to be unmounted at the end of an action, please send a diagnostic report (QRecall > Help > Send Report) and we'll look into it.