Bruji

Since upgrading to Snow Leopard, I'm unable to export a backup of DVDpedia, and also Bookpedia since I wondered if the problem was common to both. The message is (Export/Backup) Spinning barber pole trying Archiving...

Action Required
The Program failed to create an archive of your data folder, use the Finder to make a copy of the data folder.

Using most recent versions of both, Check Updates,

Is this a permissions problem? How to fix?

Sounds like it could very well be a permissions issue. We had one other user report something similar after updating to Snow Leopard, check out the post, maybe it will help you:

http://bruji.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3396&p=13297

If you are still having any trouble, please take a look at your console log, the Pedias would report all errors into the console. You can view the console log with the program of the same name in your utilities folder. New messages are towards the bottom of the log.

Still having problems but I think it could be related to the way SL changed Finder. When DVDpedia archives (zips) the entire folder found in ~/Library/Application Support, does it hand off any of the processing to Finder? Could this problem with Archiving/Backing Up be related to com.apple quarantine.plist that is affecting all files downloaded with Snow Leopard? (With Leopard, it was only with Safari, apparently.) If it is related, it would be the jpgs covers that are being quarantined? Very few upgraders were hit with this bug, but those of us who were are having problems.

<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jsp ... 0&tstart=0>

We do hand off the zipping of the archive to OS X via a command "zip" command. Something definitely changed in Snow Leopard that is affecting this entire procedure. Were there any messages in your console log after trying to create a backup file? Can you create a manual zip of the data folder in ~/Library/Application Support/DVDpedia by selecting it and using the "compress" command? This is one of those complicated bugs that relies on some settings in the OS X system after an upgrade and is hard to reproduce, but I'll keep investigating. Thank you for the link to the Apple discussion board.

One thing I'm not clear about here is the location of where you are trying to save the backup. If you change locations to another folder, does it do the same thing? Try some obvious folders like Desktop, but also a folder where everyone has write access.

From what you are describing, it sounds like the location shouldn't matter, if you don't have access to it, then the Finder would just complain, but just to be sure.

I did a couple of things so I have no idea which one or even if all worked. I had checked permissions on the destination folder but didn't check the permissions on the folder within the folder where I found my username had been replaced with "_unknown/read&write" so I created a new Backup folder and folders within that folder since I couldn't change "_unknown" (which I found on a few other folders when I did a random search.) When I installed SL, I cloned Leopard, did a pave/new install of SL and then used Migration Assistant to bring back my settings. That may account for that. I'll find out when I reinstall SL in about a month to clean up the drive (tossing unused apps, etc.)
Using other suggestions found elsewhere, I ran the quarantine.sh, and repaired permissions booted off SL disc.
I suspect it was that "_unknown" user that was causing the problem. Both DVDpedia and Bookpedia are now archiving.

Thanks.

That would indeed cause an issue. One always has to look at the whole path of the folder in question, because the culprit could indeed be "up the ladder" of the path so to speak.

Don't know what tool you used to fix permissions, but you can try it from the Disk Utility tool or inserting the install DVD and choosing fix permissions from there if you encounter this type of situation again.

Glad it's working again.

Funny about SL though, you're the second user who has reported this...