Hello,

Using the new QRecall on a new network archive, I have tried twice to back up a 80+ GB MacBook Pro but each time the machine goes to sleep, and then, when waking up, all hell breaks loose for QRecall. Incomplete backup, damaged archive (reindexing fails), ...

In this state QRecall is basically useless. Bug? Flaw? Other problem of my machine ?

Thanks

Frederic Thomas wrote:Using the new QRecall on a new network archive, I have tried twice to back up a 80+ GB MacBook Pro but each time the machine goes to sleep, and then, when waking up, all hell breaks loose for QRecall.

QRecall will happily survive through sleep cycles, whether actions are running or not.

I'd be interested in seeing the log file entries that occur when the machine is woken up again, but I suspect I know what's going on...

Incomplete backup, damaged archive (reindexing fails), ...

My guess is that the computer is losing it's connection with the volume that contains the archive. Normally (at least on my systems), putting a computer to sleep does not disconnect mounted volumes. (On the other hand, putting the system that is hosting the volume to sleep will certainly cause them to disconnect ungracefully.)

Regardless of what's causing it, there is no way for QRecall to recover from this situation any more than it could if you unplugged a firewire drive in the middle of a capture.

The archive can't be reindexed because the data is incomplete. (Reindex simply rebuilds the index files, it won't fix incomplete data). You could Repair the archive. Repair will recover as much data as possibly by creating a recovery layer that contains the recovered and incomplete items.

I still have "power management features" on my to-do list. One of these would be to prevent the computer from going to sleep while an action was running.

Dunno. Here's the log.

That's exactly what happened.

Here's the interesting log entries:

This is where your computer woke up.
2007-08-19 01:53:48.572 +0200 #debug# -[QuantumScheduler powerDidChangeNotification:] PDPowerManagementPoweredOn

Then immediately afterwards
2007-08-19 01:53:59.038 +0200 Failure Could not capture (filename)
2007-08-19 01:53:59.039 +0200 Details archive I/O error
2007-08-19 01:53:59.039 +0200 Details Data exception
2007-08-19 01:53:59.039 +0200 Details Cause: <IO> failed to write envelope content { Class=DataFile, Length=32776, API=FSWriteFork, Pos=5591783004, File=/Volumes/Leopard/krapul.quanta/repository.data, OSErr=-50 }
OS Error -50 is an I/O error. QRecall can no longer write to the archive. Since this is a network volume, I surmise that either the connection was interrupted during the sleep, or the server went to sleep and/or dropped the connection.

And finally:
2007-08-19 01:53:59.049 +0200 Capture failed
2007-08-19 01:53:59.049 +0200 A storage or disk error occurred while writing to the archive data. The archive is probably damaged.

After some experimentation, I find that I can't reproduce this problem. On every system I have to test on, QRecall's normal disk and network activity is enough to prevent the system from sleeping.

Never the less, I've added code that will "tickle" the power manager at regular intervals while an action is running. This should prevent a system from going to sleep (it should not prevent it from dimming or sleeping the display).

This change will appear in the next version. If you're dying to try it out, let me know and I'll make an interim release.