I've been having problems recently on my MBP with intermittent Finder freezes, which can sometimes be cleared by relaunching Finder and sometimes require a complete restart. One occurred this morning as I was mounting a backup volume that qrecall was waiting for, and interrupted the start of the backup. (The Activity window was showing "Opening archive" when the freeze occurred.) Qrecall continued to show the backup as running, and I eventually had to force quit Qrecall Helper in Activity Monitor to clear it. Now when I try to restart the backup, Qrecall tells me that the archive is being updated by another action. I get this message on the iMac to which the backup drive is physically mounted, as well as on the MBP, which is connected to the iMac over wifi.

What can I do to "close" the archive so that I can access it again?

Ralph

3 hours later, the problem is solved but I'm not sure what happened. Here are the details in case they're of use to you. I decided to see if I could unmount and remount the backup drive, and if that would have any effect. Actually, I thought that would tell me where the archive was being held open (MBP or iMac), because the open status would keep it from dismounting. So I first ejected the drive from the MBP. That worked without incident. I then tried to open the archive on the iMac, and got the same error message saying the archive was in use. So I tried to eject the drive from the iMac. That failed, with a message that the drive couldn't be ejected because it was still being shared. (At this point, it had already been ejected from the iMac.) I turned off File Sharing on the iMac, and found I could now open the archive on the iMac. I turned File Sharing back on and remounted the backup drive on the MBP, and voila, everything works and my backup is now in progress.

I thought that since I had posted the problem I should update the post and tell you what happened. I'm a happy camper now and don't need any further answer about why. This confirms my past experience of the robustness of Qrecall, in that whatever happens to apparently screw it up temporarily, it always recovers. That's a really important attribute of the app. Thanks again, James.

Ralph

Ralph Strauch wrote:What can I do to "close" the archive so that I can access it again?

The surgical approach: Find out what process has the file(s) open. You can use the lsof (list open files) command-line tool. Run the command, as root, on the system that hosts the QRecall Archive. The following command lists all of the open files, and what processes has them open, inside the folder /Volume/Hard Drive/Archive.quanta:

sudo lsof +D '/Volumes/Hard Drive/Archive.quanta'

Once you discover the process that has the file open, restart it (probably your network file server).

The hammer approach: Restart your computer

If you've made sure that no other process has the archive files open, and the QRecall actions still won't run, you may have an orphaned .lock file. The Repair action will fix this, but you can also just delete it via the command line or any utility that will let you see, and trash, invisible files:

rm '/Volumes/Hard Drive/Archive.quanta/.lock'