Installing beta 58 last took care of the problem of nothing displaying in the lower pane. The display was working in both archives. In the main archive, though, the upper pain was still blank and the layers were not displaying. I tried throwing away the view.plist and that didn't make any difference. It was late, so I went to bed. By the time I got around to looking at it again this morning, as scheduled backup had run, and that apparently fixed the problem. Everything is displaying properly now. If you'd still like a report or the system log entries for diagnostic purposes let me know and I'll send them along. Otherwise, I'm fine.

Ralph

Edited ps. I just read Steve Mayer's post <http://forums.qrecall.com/posts/list/381.page> about graphics processor switching causing display problems, and think that was probably the source of my problem as well.

I've sent the reports and system log entries from both computers. Neither archive contains a view.plist, but both contain status.plist and settings.plist. Should I delete either of those.?

Ralph

I'm having a problem with archive contents not displaying properly when I open an archive. This is happening with two different archives on two different machines, so the problem doesn't seem isolated to either the machine or the archive.

With both archives on both machines, only browser which shows any content is the bottom pane is the layers browser. That shows a static display that I can zoom in and out of but not navigate through. The icons browser is totally blank,.The list and column browsers show disclosure triangles, and clicking on one of the disclosure triangles will produce more triangles beneath it or in the next column, but no file information appears. My secondary archive shows the layers list in the top pane and the indications of activity by date in the left column, but both of these are totally blank in my main archive. The only difference in behavior between the two computers is that the shaders are visible on my iMac but not on my MacBook Pro. I've had behavior like this occasionally in the past, but it's always been temporary. This time it's remained constant for the past couple of days, and has persisted through quitting and reopening qrecall and restarting the computers.

One other piece of strange behavior: My secondary archive is part of a pair where I keep one off-site and trade off periodically. I just swapped the off-site drive yesterday, and the first backup of both machines to this drive, which they hadn't been backed up to for about 10 days, produced backups of less than 100kb. Subsequent backups of both machines looked normal in terms of the size of the backup, but I couldn't look to see what had been backed up because of the display problem.

Both computers are running 10.7.3 and qrecall beta 1.2.0.57.

Ralph

Ralph

Thanks for pointing out the Combine Items option. I guess I missed that when it went by.

Ralph

OK, thanks. I'll ignore the Capture issues, or perhaps just exclude /dev from the backup.

Ralph

As the result of system updates, experimenting with filevault2, etc., I now have five different volumes, all with the same name, in my archive for the same drive. I just noticed in the help files that I can delete entire volumes from the archive. If I do delete a volume, will that just remove the files on that volume from the archive, or will it also remove those files from all the other volumes as well? If the former, that would be a nice way to get rid of some of those extra volumes, but if the latter, it would end up throwing away more than I want to get rid of.

Ralph

I backup two computers to the same archive, backing up user files every day and backing up the full drives weekly to pick up system changes, etc. This system runs smoothly so I don't pay much attention to it most of the time. I've just noticed that for the past couple of months the log has been showing "Capture issues" for the full disk backups from both computers. The user files backups on both commuters seem to be fine. I just noticed the problem after installing the latest beta, but it was apparently going on for a while before that.

On my MacBook Pro the problem seems to be the same every time, as follows:

Action 2012-01-21 08:17:26 Capture mbhd
Action 2012-01-21 08:17:41 Minutia Locating changes since Saturday, January 14, 2012 12:24 PM
Action 2012-01-21 08:29:25 Capture issues
Action 2012-01-21 08:39:04 volume mbhd
Action 2012-01-21 08:29:25 folder dev
Action 2012-01-21 08:29:25 Curious Could not determine display name
Action 2012-01-21 08:29:25 cannot get display name
Action 2012-01-21 08:29:25 Error: Unexpected internal error
Action 2012-01-21 08:29:25 Minutia Path: /dev
Action 2012-01-21 08:29:25 Minutia OSErrName: kLSUnknownErr
Action 2012-01-21 08:29:25 Minutia OSErr: -10810
Action 2012-01-21 08:39:08 Captured 394 items, 1.62 GB (56% duplicate)
Action 2012-01-21 08:39:29 ------- Capture finished (22:05)

On he iMac, the problem sometimes identifies as "folder dev" with nothing deeper showing, like this,

ction 2012-01-15 01:00:00 ------- Capture to 2nd backup.quanta
Action 2012-01-15 01:00:00 archive: /Volumes/FantomHD/2nd backup.quanta
Action 2012-01-15 01:00:05 Capture iMacHD
Action 2012-01-15 01:00:22 Capture issues
Action 2012-01-15 01:06:48 volume iMacHD
Action 2012-01-15 01:00:22 folder dev
Action 2012-01-15 01:06:50 Captured 146 items, 4.35 GB (94% duplicate)
Action 2012-01-15 01:06:54 ------- Capture finished (06:49)

and sometimes show a deeper tree of issues down into Circus Ponies Notebook

Action 2012-01-22 01:00:01 ------- Capture to 2nd backup.quanta
Action 2012-01-22 01:00:01 archive: /Volumes/FantomHD/2nd backup.quanta
Action 2012-01-22 01:00:15 Capture iMacHD
Action 2012-01-22 01:00:48 Capture issues
Action 2012-01-22 01:17:46 volume iMacHD
Action 2012-01-22 01:17:46 Applications/Apps-misc/CircusPoniesNoteBook2.1
Action 2012-01-22 01:00:48 folder NoteBook.app
Action 2012-01-22 01:01:03 NoteBook.app
Action 2012-01-22 01:00:49 folder Contents
Action 2012-01-22 01:01:03 Contents
Action 2012-01-22 01:00:49 folder Frameworks
Action 2012-01-22 01:01:03 Frameworks
Action 2012-01-22 01:00:51 folder MacOS
Action 2012-01-22 01:00:51 folder Resources
Action 2012-01-22 01:01:03 Resources
Action 2012-01-22 01:05:23 folder dev
Action 2012-01-22 01:17:48 Captured 440 items, 4.84 GB (93% duplicate)
Action 2012-01-22 01:17:58 ------- Capture finished (17:42)


How much should I worry about this? Is it just telling me that a few particular files didn't get captured, or is there some more problematical going on here?

Ralph

Whoops!! Operator error!!! Looking at my log more carefully in order to clarify the report I was sending, I see that the "mysterious" cancelation requests that stopped my scheduled backups were caused by low free space warnings. When I manually restarted the warning wasn't active so the backup went ahead and ran. I apologize for wasting your time with my inattention to detail.

Ralph

My scheduled backups of my MacBook Pro are set to "hold if no archive" so that they will run automatically when the backup disk becomes available. That's been working fine, but recently it's begun behaving strangely. The Activity Monitor shows the backup as waiting for the archive, but then when the archive is mounted the backup starts and then immediately stops, with nothing captured. The log shows a cancel request at the time the archive was mounted. If I then manually trigger the backup, it runs normally.

I've been noticing this for a couple of weeks -- starting before the most recent beta update. Here's a log sequence showing what happens. The backup was scheduled for 03:00 but that that time the lid was closed and the archive was not mounted. I opened the lid at 09:21, at which time Qrecall began to wait, then mounted the archive at 12:11. Something triggered a cancel request and the capture stopped,. I then initiated it manually and it ran fine.


Action 2011-11-10 12:11:04 ------- Capture to 2nd backup.quanta
Action 2011-11-10 09:21:33 Minutia Waiting for archive
Action 2011-11-10 12:11:04 Minutia Received cancel request
Action 2011-11-10 12:11:04 archive: /Volumes/FantomHD/2nd backup.quanta
Action 2011-11-10 12:11:04 Capture Stopped
Action 2011-11-10 12:11:04 The layer created by this capture is incomplete and may be missing items. Use caution when recalling items in this layer.
Action 2011-11-10 12:11:04 ------- Capture finished (00:00)
Action 2011-11-10 12:12:49 ------- Capture to 2nd backup.quanta
Action 2011-11-10 12:12:49 archive: /Volumes/FantomHD/2nd backup.quanta
Action 2011-11-10 12:13:10 Capture Users
Action 2011-11-10 12:13:10 mbhd:Users
Action 2011-11-10 12:13:20 Minutia Locating changes since Tuesday, November 8, 2011 8:02 AM
Action 2011-11-10 12:29:10 Captured 45 items, 1.04 GB (28% duplicate)
Action 2011-11-10 12:29:58 ------- Capture finished (16:54)

Also, the activity monitor doesn't accurately reflect what's going on. Right now mine shows that it's waiting for the next scheduled backup, while I'm in the middle of compacting layers. The log correctly show the compaction as in progress.

Ralph

James Bucanek wrote:When you see this error, you'll want to open the log and review what actually happened to the action. If the action logs that it finished (i.e. "Capture finished (33:35)"), then nothing serious happened. If the action logged that something went wrong, then that's a problem. If the action didn't long anything after the loss-of-communications error, then the helper process could have crashed, which is very serious.

The instances I'm seeing are unconnected with any action. Here are the timings on the last 4.

9/14 last action recall at 11:00, disconnect at 11:15
9/15 backup at 07:53, disconnect at 18:12
9/16 backup at 8:57, disconnect at 11:06
9/17 backup at 10:17, disconnect at 14:22

(The backups are at seemingly random times because the MBP doesn't wake up when closed, so the backup happens when I open the lid.) I think that Qrecall may have been running in the background all this time, so I'll make sure to turn it off for a few days and see if that makes a difference.

Ralph

My scheduled backups are running fine, but every day or so an error message pops up in my log saying "Unable to connect with helper." It happens at what seems like a random time, unconnected with any of my scheduled events, and it's happening on both my MBP and my wife's iMac. When I click the disclosure triangle I get

Unable to connect with helper
cannot establish a connection with helper
Port: QRecallHelper.xxxxxxxx, where xxxxxxxx is a different hexadecimal string each time.

It's not causing any problems for me, but just seems strange.

OSX 10.7.1 and Qrecall 1.2.0.41 on both computers.

Ralph

Thanks for the detailed reply. The problems were caused, apparently, by the WD Raid enclosure I was using.Doth drives seem to be fine individually now that I've removed them from the enclosure. I thought that the archive itself was unreadable when I couldn't copy it to another drive, but I think now that my power cord had pulled loose causing the computer to shut and interrupt the copy. I've now successfully repaired the archive and everything is back to normal.

Here's another question, though. I'd like to use the two drives I pulled from the Raid unit to keep two copies of the archive -- storing one offsite and switching them periodically. Will I encounter any problems if I name both drives and archives identically, and use the same Action to backup to whichever drive happens to be connected? That seems like it should work if all the status information is stored in the archive, and it's certainly simpler than have a separate action for each drive.

Ralph

I seem to have an archive that is beyond repair. Attempts to repair it or even copy it to another drive result in the drive suddenly taking itself off-line. I originally thought it was a bad drive, but in light of the overall behavior I think there might be a problem with the archive file itself. I'm describing it here in case it's useful for you to know about.

For the past three years I've been backing up two Macs to a WD MyBook Pro, consisting of two 500gb drives in a Raid 1 configuration. (I originally bought the unit thinking I could use the drives separately but that didn't turn out to be true.) The system has worked well, by and large. It did occasionally give me network or drive errors that would corrupt my archive, but qrecall was always able to repair it. Several weeks ago the failures got worse, with the drive regularly unmounting itself during a backup. So I set it aside and shifted to a new backup drive, thinking that the problem was with the enclosure and the drives themselves were probably fine. (This happened about the time I upgraded to Lion, I believe.)

This week I got around to taking the drives out of the case and trying them both individually. Each exhibited the same behavior as they had in the case. When I tried to open the archive qrecall would tell me it needed to be reindexed, and when I tried to repair it the drive would unmount itself part way through. Both drives checked out OK using Disk Utility and Tech Tool Pro. It seemed unlikely to me that both drives would suffer the same failure at the same time. I erased one of the drives and ran a new backup on it, and that worked fine. I then tried copying the archive from the other drive to a new drive. Other files on the drive copied properly, but part way through the archive copy the source drive dismounted and left and incomplete file on the destination -- just as it had done during repair attempts.

I'll send you a report on this from qrecall. My concern is with the possibility that the archive somehow got so corrupted that it can't be repaired. I can probably get along without ever needing to go back to the older files that I lost, but it shakes what had been my complete faith in qrecall. If you have any idea of what might have happened, I'd appreciate that.

Ralph

I repaired the archive last night, even though the error being reported was a "network or disk error" and the archive seemed to open find in qrecall. My automatic daily backup of Users files followed without a hitch. I'm now running a backup of the full drive and it seems to be proceeding normally, albeit slowly.

I had avoided the original Filevault because it seemed like too much of a kludge, and just kept important files on an encrypted disk image. The current implementation seems much more sensible, though, and nice to have on a laptop. Qrecall seems to be working fine with it now, and hopefully after the first long backup things will go back to being quicker. I'll send you another report after this backup finishes, in case there's anything in it that's useful.

Thanks again for your prompt attention and for the great support you provide. It's part of what makes Qrecall such a pleasure to use.

Ralph

I encrypted my MacBook Pro hard drive yesterday using Filevault 2, assuming that it should work with qrecall since the disk would be mounted when backing up. I then started my daily backup of User files, which usually finds a couple of hundred megabits and takes 10 minutes or so. After 2 hours qrecall had backed up 20gb (out of close to 300gb), with 99% duplicate. I concluded that it must be doing a total read of the drive and that it was probably so slow because the backup drive was connected through my Airport Express, so I stopped the backup intending to resume with the drive directly mounted on the MBP. When I tried to resume the backup it failed with a "network or disk error encountered." I repaired the drive with Disk Utility, which found that "Volume header needs minor repair" and repaired it. The drive now reads good in Disk Utility and and the archive will open in qrecall, but I keep getting the "network or disk error encountered" error when I try to backup. What should I try next? (I'll send you a qrecall report now.)

Are there any other issues I should expect using qrecall with file vault?

Qrecall started a second volume when I upgraded to Lion and a third one for the file vault backup. I think I remember you saying sometime that there was going to be a way to combine volumes like this. Is that possible yet?

Ralph