This is not so much a bug as simply a report of qrecall's behavior under stress. While I was backing up my MBP this morning I meant to disconnect a USB peripheral that was plugged in and pulled out the firewire cable to my backup drive instead. Qrecallmonitor showed no sign of destress and looked like qrecall was just chugging along so I plugged the cable back in to see what would happen. Qrecallmonitor continued to show the backup as occurring, with time continuing to change but with no additional items being backed up.

I tried to stop the backup by clicking on the x in Qrecallmonitor, with no response. Quitting Qrecall didn't help either. I eventually had to quit Qrecall Helper using Activity Monitor. I then restarted the backup and it quickly repaired the archive and the backup.

While it would have been nicer if the interrupted backup had responded to my attempts to quit from Qrecall Monitor, I found this behavior overall acceptable and a big improvement over the way Qrecall used to handle such interruptions the last time I had one a year or so ago.

ralph

Ralph Strauch wrote:I tried to stop the backup by clicking on the x in Qrecallmonitor, with no response. ... While it would have been nicer if the interrupted backup had responded to my attempts to quit from Qrecall Monitor, I found this behavior overall acceptable and a big improvement over the way Qrecall used to handle such interruptions the last time I had one a year or so ago.

Ralph,

Thanks for the feedback. Technically, there's not much that QRecall can do in a situation like this. Manually killing the QRecallHelper process, as you did, is exactly the course of action I would have suggested.

Unplugging a hard drive may cause the thread that's trying to write to the volume to seize. The other threads in the process weren't affected, which is why the action appeared to continue running and responded to requests to quit. However, it can't actually quit until the stuck thread resumed—which I suspect it never would.

I agree that the auto-recovery feature added to the latest version is great improvement over having to repair the archive. I know it's saved me many a time.