Hi

I am now using the latest beta and have noticed an error message along the lines of "unable to read extended attributes...."
The backup seems to have run fine though. Searching for this error message on this forum did not turn up any results but I assume this is harmless. Correct?

Prion wrote:but I assume this is harmless. Correct?

Probably. The details of that error message will tell you the name of the extended attribute that couldn't be read and the BSD error code reported by the OS as to why it couldn't be read. If you want, send a diagnostic report (Help > Send Report) and I'll take a look at it.

Extended attributes are usually small, non-essential, bits of extra data attached to a file or folder. They may be important, but often are not.

The reason you can't read them could be some restriction (via an access control list) on reading that attribute, or the attribute is malformed (I'm not sure how that would happen), it could have been a race condition (the attribute was deleted before QRecall had a chance to read it), or the directory structure of the volume could be damaged.

If it continues to happen on the same file, then I'd start by repairing the volume using Disk Utility or something like Disk Warrior. If that doesn't fix it, you might consider deleting that file or stripping it of its extended attributes (cp -X). If you're interested in investigating the problem, you could try using the xattr command-line tool to list the extended attributes (xattr -l file) of the file and see if you get the similar problem reading them. If you do, try to delete the offending one (xattr -d attr-name file). There's no man page for xattr; use xattr -h to get its meager help info.

If it doesn't happen again, then it might have simply been some other process changing the attributes at the moment that QRecall was trying to capture them. That can happen, and there's no way to protect against it other than to take another capture.