External backup drives causing CO 1 to respond sluggishly
I am using CO 1 latest version on my iMac Pro. I have two backup Thunderbolt 2 drives connected in a daisy chain via an Apple adapter to a Thunderbolt 3 port on the iMac Pro. When the drives are attached and turned on CO 1 is sluggish in all aspects and I can hear disk activity in the external drives when doing edits. I do not use a CO Catalog and the images being edited are in a Session. The backup drives are clones of the hard drive and so there are versions of CO on them. I would like these to be dormant except when a backup operation is being explicitly carried out. Disconnecting the drives restores CO to normal responsiveness. Is there any way of keeping the drives attached without the active version of CO on the internal drive producing activity on the external drives. Incidentally I have had look in the Console logs and curiously there is an entry that refers to one of the backup drives named CO referenced. Here is an extract from the log:
2020-08-22 17:53:35> (WARNING) Libtiff(TIFFFetchNormalTag) : Incompatible type for "RichTIFFIPTC"; tag ignored
2020-08-22 17:53:36> CRawImageRep::Create: 0.526s elapsed creating RawRep for [/Volumes/CO referenced/_D5A3629.tif]
2020-08-22 17:53:37> CRawImageRep::Create: 0.512s elapsed creating RawRep for [/Volumes/CO referenced/_D5A3634.tif]
2020-08-22 17:53:38> CRawImageRep::Create: 0.531s elapsed creating RawRep for [/Volumes/CO referenced/_D5A3643.tif]
2020-08-22 17:54:08> Libtiff(TIFFFetchNormalTag) : Incompatible type for "RichTIFFIPTC"; tag ignored
2020-08-22 17:54:08> (5 identical messages logged; delayed 32.081s .. 29.325s.)
Any thoughts or guidance would be much appreciated.
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What software is cloning the hard drive to the external ones? Are there settings in that software that can be changed? Every time you make an edit (move a slider for example) Capture One will record it in the .cos file associated with the image in question. So every time you do that, the .cos file is being rewritten on the external drives as well, possibly every second or two.
Is there a way of getting the drive synced say every hour or every few minutes, not every time there is a change? You can't (and wouldn't want to) stop Capture One recording your edits as you go, second by second, but copying all that to two external drives too, in real time, is bound to slow things down, I would think.
Ian
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Hi Bruce,
I have the same configuration as yours. I clone my hard drive and my image storage drive, say, every month, and sometimes I forget to disconnect my backup drive, but I can't see the same issue as yours in that case. I would suggest to drag your active Capture One from the application folder (in your MacIntosh HD) to the dock and launch the application from the dock. It works with me.
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Thanks Ian and Robert for your ideas, which are very interesting.
My main software for the backup is Super Duper, which is set to clone automatically once each night to one of the drives (CO referenced). As far as I can see there is no function in it for backup other than at scheduled times. There is also a volume on the other of these drives that is used by Time Machine for a further TM style backup . This runs every hour but not continuously as far as I am aware and in any case its preference settings exclude the drives in question from its backups.
I wonder whether the problem results from my adoption of the lazy habit of reusing a Session file. I import new images into this session. Do the edits. Then export to another external drive (not one of those in question). I delete the images from the session (including from disk) . Any further edits are done with Affinity Photo and for DAM I use NeoFinder. This procedure leaves CO with a session file apparently empty that I can use without setting up a new session every time I use CO. However a copy of the "empty" session will reside on the backup drives. It may well be that CO treats these other examples of the session as alive and in need of amendment for each edit, whilst looking vain for the relevant image. I will experiment with using a new session each time to see if that makes a difference.
As regards Robert's suggestion I can confirm that I launch CO from the Dock each time it is used
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Hi Bruce,
It almost sounds like you are inadvertently working on data stored on one of your external drives. The easiest way to check that is to quite Capture One and then eject your externals by right clicking on their icons in the Finder and selecting 'Eject'. Next launch Capture One and open your editing session. If there are any problems at this point Capture One is looking for something that it can't access. That will give you an idea of how to proceed. Apologies if you have already done something like this but it's worth a try to rule out the obvious problems first.
Phil
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hm, maybe it is only the os re-indexing your drive ? the fix: you can stop this by excluding your drive from the spotlight search in the system preferences.
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I switched from SuperDuper! to Carbon Copy Cloner years ago, and I don't remember whether SD! can do this or not. For CCC, I've set the backup/clone process to run when the backup drive ("target") appears and to dismount the target after backup's complete. That way my backup drives are offline except during the actual backup.
Then when I want to run a backup, I simply reconnect, turn on, or mount the desired volume (I have 3 backup volumes) and CCC executes properly and then unmounts the drive. You might see if you can do this with SD!
Also, I've excluded all of my backup volumes from Spotlight indexing. I think this is very important to do because otherwise, every time you run a backup, Spotlight has to reindex the drive because (obviously) backup changed its contents. The indexing task runs in the background and I've noticed that it can seriously slow the computer down until indexing is complete.
What you might be seeing:
- Spotlight indexing your backup drive(s). If indexing wasn't complete when you took the drive offline, it picks up where it left off when the disk goes back online, which of course causes contention between Spotlight and the backup program.
- If C1 is running during backup, I think you may be creating problems for the backup because both C1 and the backup program are trying to access some of the same files. Your backup program must access both your working and backup drives, which can cause drive contention. To avoid this I always run backups after quitting C1. In fact, I only clone any of my drives when I'm not doing anything else on the computer. This eliminates drive contention and also reduces the possibility of data getting corrupted during backup.
- As suggested, C1 may be trying to access files on your backup drive, although I think this is unlikely, assuming your originals are still on your working drive. C1 doesn't, afaik, try to automatically find missing files.
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Thanks for all the suggestions. I removed the "reusable" Session from the internal and external drives and everything seems normal again.
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