Hi, I am using and enjoying 1.2 beta, almost without event. Thank you.
One small suggestion: in the Conditions section of the Action settings dialog, you can set an "Ignore Between" time span, but if you press + to add another condition and try to choose "Ignore Between" again, it is greyed out: so you cannot choose two separate time spans. Is this an arbitrary limitation, or would it be tricky to code to allow for multiple time spans here?

It may not be something that you would expect a user to want, but in fact I find that while I want to prevent QR from doing things at the heart of my working day, I also want it to stay inactive at the same time that I am scheduling separate backups in the middle of the night. There are other ways round this I am sure, but the ability to further fine-tune scheduling in this way would certainly be welcome.

What brought this issue to the fore for me was finding my G5 awake in the mornings when it should have gone to sleep as normal after a SuperDuper backup scheduled for 3am. This seemed to be becoming a habit that only started around the time I updated QR to 1.2b, and I found that if I paused QR actions manually the evening before,it would not happen. There would be no QR progress windows showing, and I can't be certain that QR was implicated, but it looks like a probability.

Thanks, Nick

Nicholas Sloan wrote:Hi, I am using and enjoying 1.2 beta, almost without event. Thank you.

That's always good to hear.

One small suggestion: in the Conditions section of the Action settings dialog, you can set an "Ignore Between" time span, but if you press + to add another condition and try to choose "Ignore Between" again, it is greyed out: so you cannot choose two separate time spans. Is this an arbitrary limitation, or would it be tricky to code to allow for multiple time spans here?

Neither, I just wanted to avoid confusion. It just so happens that I was thinking about this this other day because I have plans to add other conditions; conditions that would also make sense to add to the schedule more than once. I really just wanted to avoid the and/or anxiety that can come with some conditions. Thanks for pointing this out. I'll add it to the to-do list.

What brought this issue to the fore for me was finding my G5 awake in the mornings when it should have gone to sleep as normal after a SuperDuper backup scheduled for 3am. This seemed to be becoming a habit that only started around the time I updated QR to 1.2b, and I found that if I paused QR actions manually the evening before,it would not happen.

There could be a number of factors in play here. First, QRecall 1.2b1 uses a different (more modern) method of telling the operating system not to go to sleep while an action is running. The modern API behaves a little differently than the old one.

If you've added any power management options to your action schedules, this could cause your system to wake up. For example, one side-effect of asking the computer to go to sleep, restart, or shutdown after a series of QRecall actions have finished is that the OS will wake up the monitor to show you the dialog telling you that the computer is going to go to sleep. <Insert old joke about nurses waking up patients to give them their sleeping pills.>

There would be no QR progress windows showing, and I can't be certain that QR was implicated, but it looks like a probability.

The log should tell you what QRecall was doing, and when. You'll need to slide the details control all the way to the right to see insignificant events like power requests.

Thanks for the response James, and good to hear that the primary suggestion has made it to the to-do list.

As for the sleep issue, all my actions are set to "After running actions: Do Nothing", so there shouldn't be any power handling glitches from QR, but the problem persists, and does seem to depend on R being active in the night. I have sent you a report in any case.

Is there any reason to suppose that things might be different on PPC/10.5.8 (which I am running now) from Intel/10.6.2 (which I expect to be running next week)?

Nicholas Sloan wrote:Is there any reason to suppose that things might be different on PPC/10.5.8 (which I am running now) from Intel/10.6.2 (which I expect to be running next week)?

I wouldn't expect so, unless there are differences in how these two operating systems behave that I'm not aware of.

I'm out of town this week. I'll review your diagnostic report when I return. In the mean time, please note any differences your see when you move to Snow Leopard, and feel free to submit another diagnostic report after trying it out on your new computer.

What brought this issue to the fore for me was finding my G5 awake in the mornings when it should have gone to sleep as normal after a SuperDuper backup scheduled for 3am. This seemed to be becoming a habit that only started around the time I updated QR to 1.2b, and I found that if I paused QR actions manually the evening before,it would not happen. There would be no QR progress windows showing, and I can't be certain that QR was implicated, but it looks like a probability.

Nicholas,

I still don't know what's going on here. I did get a chance to review the diagnostic report you sent me, and there's a possible coorrilation between your computer waking up around 3AM and QRecall, but I can't reproduce it here.

You do have a set of QRecall actions scheduled to run starting at 3:10. So if you have a SuperDuper copy scheduled to run around 3:00, QRecall will definitely fire up soon after. You don't have any power management requests associated with these actions, so I don't see why QRecall (by itself) would be causing your computer's monitor to wake up. I've created test cases here, using the same version of Mac OS X, where I allow the monitor to go to sleep followed by a scheduled QRecall action and the monitor never wakes up. There could be some interaction between QRecall and SuperDuper, but I can't imagine what.

Anyway, you could simply reschedule those actions to run at some other time and see what happens. If the QRecall actions continue to wake up your computer, I can prepare a version of QRecall that doesn't try to keep your system from going to sleep and see if that changes its behavior.

James, thank you very much for your persistence. As it happens I have just migrated from PPC/10.5 to Intel/10.6, but have not yet configured my new backups. It seems more than likely that when I do I may have left this particular annoyance behind --though there will surely be other annoyances to take its place. So while it may be irritating for you not to have pinned it down, especially when you have given it so much thought, it does begin to seem a bit academic.

Depending on how much of a backup I hand out to QRecall (until now I have only been using QR to archive small quantities of critical files) I would definitely try to avoid overlapping it with other busy processes --and a more flexible approach to time exclusions would be helpful here.

Many thanks again, Nick