Scheduling not working?

[kbradnam]

Hi,

I upgraded to version 2 yesterday and set about using the new scheduling feature. I transferred the details of all the backups that I was previously running by hand (via an apple script) to the new scheduling feature. All backups have been set to run every day in the early hours of the morning.

Coming into work today, I see that the schedule window lists tomorrow's date in the 'Next Copy' column but there is nothing in the 'Last Copy' column. As far as I can tell, none of the scheduled backups actually ran.

The entries are all present in my crontab file and have the correct launch times. I went to check the SuperDuper log file using the Console application, and it appears that version 2 no longer writes to ~/Library/Logs as the last entry in the log file was my last backup with the older version.

Any ideas as to what is happening (or not happening as the case may be)? Our machine is set to never sleep, and the external firewire drives are connected and mounted (we also back up to some internal drives as well). All users were logged out (I assumed this was ok as it is running from a crontab).

The other thing that is confusing me is that if I open one of our copy scripts and then click on the schedule button, it comes up with the default Monday-Friday 9:30 am backup, even though I have set a different schedule for this backup.

Finally (sorry for making this so long), I noticed that if I run a backup by hand, then that also doesn't change the 'Last Copy' field of the 'Scheduled Copies' window.

Hope you can help,

Keith

[dnanian]

As explained in the User's Guide, once scheduled your operation resides entirely in the "Scheduled Copies" window. The main window just creates new scheduled copies (or acts in an immediate fashion) -- you need to edit the jobs from the Scheduled Copies window.

If all users were logged out, that's why the schedule didn't run. The crontab modified is the logged in user's crontab. If you want things to run when all users are logged out, you'll have to install and set things up as "root", which has its own security implications, but will work.

Hope that helps, Keith.

[kbradnam]

As ever, thanks for the speedy and helpful reply Dave.

I just tried copying an entry from the user crontab to the root crontab (/etc/crontab) and specified root as the owner, but that in itself didn't seem enough to make it work.

I guess if I want scheduled backups then I will have to accept that I need to keep a user logged in (or I will have to delve into Applescript again to make a script which logs a user in during the middle of the night).

In reference to my other question...is there still somewhere where I can find a single log with all SuperDuper activity recorded?

Thanks,

Keith

[dnanian]

No, Keith -- that's not going to work. You'll need to enable the root user, log in as root, install SD!, set up your schedules. That should be fine.

There is no single place that logs all SD! activity. Each run is kept separately, with its own log.

[chabig]

So Dave. If I do this, does that mean root has to remain logged in?

Chris

[dnanian]

No: root is kind of always logged in, Chris.