Lockups - spinning beachball of DOOOM!

[Redwolf]

I've been a SuperDuper customer for a long while now. I have a Power Mac, dual 1Ghz mirror door. 80Gb main drive, 160Gb secondary w/ two 80Gb partitions. I back up the main to one of the secondary partitions.

Every once in a while, Superduper just chokes on the smart backup script, which I have running at 10am every day. It either chokes on preparing the backup drive, in which case I find the program is still "preparing" the drive for the past seven hours when I get home from work, or else it's choked during the backup process, near the end, and has locked up the entire computer with the spinning ball of doom.

The later requires a power off and reboot.

SMART says the target disk is good. Disk Utility says it's good, with no errors.

Once it starts locking up, the only way to clear the issue is to do a complete backup again, and it'll be good for a week or more.

SuperDuper is a great product, and has saved my butt after a OS update hosed the system. But I sure wish these lockups would go away.

yes, I'm running the latest version.

-Red

[dnanian]

Hi, Red.

SuperDuper! isn't actually locking up: the system is. And it's likely because your backup drive (or some other drive) has stopped responding to the system, so it's blocked in the kernel.

Are you certain your drives are set up properly using Cable Select? Are you running any low-level software -- antivirus, etc -- that might be contributing?

[Redwolf]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Hi, Red.

SuperDuper! isn't actually locking up: the system is. And it's likely because your backup drive (or some other drive) has stopped responding to the system, so it's blocked in the kernel.

Are you certain your drives are set up properly using Cable Select? Are you running any low-level software -- antivirus, etc -- that might be contributing?

Yes, it's set up using Cable Select - I goofed several years ago when I added the second drive, trying the Master/Slave setting. Cable Select is the only way you can get the drives recognized.

No, I'm not running any low-level software that I'm aware of. (I'll run anti-virus when we get some viruses to worry about)

[dnanian]

OK. What about external drives and network mounts?

If you're not running any low-level software of note, it's likely you have a hardware problem. It could be all sorts of things, unfortunately, and diagnosing it without the machine is difficult at best.

It might help if you could get things into the exact setup you usually use during backups (especially failed ones), and then generate a System Profiler report. To do so, run System Profiler, choose File > Save and then save in the default (XML) format. Once done, Control-click the resulting file and choose "Create archive...", then take the ZIP file generated and send it into support. I'll take a look.

[atebit]

I also have a 13" MacBook with 1GB/80GB. I tried an initial backup via SuperDuper over the weekend to a FW 80GB Seagate drive. At some point in the process (wasn't watching it at the time), the system must have crashed cause I came back to a "gray" screen, and the system was not responsive. After rebooting there was nothing in the syslog, crash log or any SuperDuper application logs to indicate there was a problem. The backup on the FW disk wasn't complete, either.

While I ~was~ wathcing it, I did notice that throughput seemed to be monotonically decreasing, which I wasn't happy about, but maybe that was a symptom of the problem.

Again, love to buy the program if we can figure out what the issue might be.

[dnanian]

It sounds to me like your system failed, atebit. As with the above user, are you running any low-level software that might be contributing to the problem?

[atebit]

No, this is a pretty much out-of the box MacBook, plus whatever OSX updates that were installed right after connecting it to the network. Is there any debugging I can turn on in SD to amp up the logging it does?

[dnanian]

No, not really. What I'd suggest is opening the system log in console and watching that carefully during the backup operation for clues.

Please realize that we're a "user level" application. We don't interact with the system at a low level, and can't really cause system crashes or hangs. We can trigger other things to fail, of course, but we can't really be the cause of the crash...

[atebit]

Understood. I'll give the console log a try...