QRecall

Bruce Giles

I hesitated posting this here, because I'm not at all sure it's QRecall's fault, but I'll never find out if I don't ask.

I'm running both QRecall and Time Machine. Why both? Well, I'm still running test versions of QRecall, and I like to have a backup plan for my backup plan, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, QRecall ran its regularly scheduled archive action at 6:00 PM today, and finished about 6:02 PM. There were no errors (I double-checked to log file to be sure.)

At 6:12 PM, Time Machine ran, but it failed to complete its backup. I checked the system.log file and found the following entries (I added some line breaks so you wouldn't have to scroll horizontally to read this message):

11/12/08 6:12:35 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9020] Starting standard backup 

11/12/08 6:12:35 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9020] Backing up to: /Volumes/G-Drive/Backups.backupdb 

11/12/08 6:12:36 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9020] No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.30 GB requested

          (including padding), 267.61 GB available 

11/12/08 6:12:43 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9020] Stopping backup. 

11/12/08 6:12:43 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9020] Error: (-43) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/bgiles/Library

          /Preferences/QRecall/Actions to

          /Volumes/G-Drive/Backups.backupdb/Bruce iMac/2008-11-12-181236.inProgress

          /7B68BD0E-3C7C-42B7-9E09-A19D98D3BCD7/Macintosh HD/Users/bgiles/Library/Preferences/QRecall 

11/12/08 6:12:43 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9020] Copied 738 files (98.9 MB) from volume Macintosh HD. 

11/12/08 6:12:43 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9020] Copy stage failed with error:11 

11/12/08 6:12:48 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9020] Backup failed with error: 11

As you can see, it appears to have stopped because of a File Not Found (-43) error on the Actions folder in the QRecall preferences folder. Any idea why? A subsequent manual Time Machine backup completed without any errors and there's plenty of room (several hundred Gigabytes) on the backup drive.

-- Bruce

James Bucanek

I can't think of any reason why QRecall should interfere with Time Machine. The error associated with QRecall's Preferences folder is especially mysterious, since there's nothing special about that directory at all. In fact, unless you edit an action or an archive is moved, the contents of that directory don't change.

Maybe Apple updated Time Machine to stop working if QRecall is installed.

I suspect that something else went wrong. I have no ideal what error 11 is, and suspect you'll never find out as Apple doesn't publish any Time Machine error code specifics. There's a couple of threads on Apple's discussion forum where people have reported failed Time Machine backups with error -43, but they don't appear to have garnered any response from Apple.

The general consensus of these threads seems to be that "Time Machine is great, just make sure you have a second backup strategy."

Bruce Giles

James Bucanek wrote:I can't think of any reason why QRecall should interfere with Time Machine. The error associated with QRecall's Preferences folder is especially mysterious, since there's nothing special about that directory at all. In fact, unless you edit an action or an archive is moved, the contents of that directory don't change.

That's pretty much what I thought. And no, I was not editing an action at the time. The QRecall app wasn't even running.

Maybe Apple updated Time Machine to stop working if QRecall is installed.

I'm beginning to think so...

I suspect that something else went wrong. I have no ideal what error 11 is, and suspect you'll never find out as Apple doesn't publish any Time Machine error code specifics. There's a couple of threads on Apple's discussion forum where people have reported failed Time Machine backups with error -43, but they don't appear to have garnered any response from Apple.

Yeah, I did some searches on that myself and didn't turn up anything useful.

The general consensus of these threads seems to be that "Time Machine is great, just make sure you have a second backup strategy."

I have to agree. I've had several cases where Time Machine has claimed various mysterious errors and sometimes I've had to delete the Time Machine backup files and start from scratch to get it running again. I have not had any problems like that with QRecall