O Drive Desktop Sync crashes after ~3-4 seconds (OSX) (with video)

Heya,

I recently purchased O Drive premium. It is connected to an Amazon Cloud Drive account.

I installed Desktop Sync on my iMac (10.12.1) and set a directory (located on a thunderbolt RAID enclosure) as an external sync folder. It’s a pretty big directory — about 4.5TB.

My up-speed is 200Mbps.

I left it going overnight and it was still going all the next day as I worked (which was as expected, my estimate was ~52 hours best case scenario) however, at the end of the day — completely out of habit — while the sync was still in progress I shut down the computer before going home.

It was my expectation that this morning I would be able to boot up and that O Drive Desktop Sync would simply continue the big upload.

Instead, O Drive Desktop Sync closes after 3 or 4 seconds. Every time I try and open it again, it just closes after 3 or 4 seconds. I’ve shut down the iMac and turned it back on, and O Drive’s behaviour continues.

I’m not sure if it will help or not, but I have uploaded a screen-cap of this happening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSndT_vlcbc

Any ideas how I can get Desktop Sync to stay open??

If you need any other specific details that I’ve left out let me know.

Many thanks :slight_smile:

Alastair

Hi @alastair.tye.samson,
Sorry to hear you are running into this issue.

Can you check to see if there are any crash reports generated when this happens? You can look for one from the console (type console into Spotlight search) and then navigate to the “User Diagnostic Reports” section. If you can send a couple to me (if they exist), I can see if anything stands out.

Hi Tony,

Thanks for looking into this for me :slight_smile:

Sorry for the delay — I’m in another time zone and had a busy morning.

The forum is telling me that as a new user I can only attach one file per post. Are you able to let me upload more than that?

Here’s the most recent one, anyway…

odrive_2017-05-03-140237_sheridan.crash (216.0 KB)

Hi @alastair.tye.samson,
If this is what I think it is (the crash report indicates it probably is), we have seen this issue pop up occasionally, although we haven’t found a definitive solution for it yet. The root is that MacOS is sending information to us in a format it is not supposed to and this unexpected data causes problems.

The cause seems to be linked to external drives. Can you see if odrive starts up if you disconnect your external drive. If so, see if it continues running once you reconnect the drive. Once the drive is reconnected, go to the “sync to odrive” listing in the odrive menu and click on the mount(s) that you have on that external drive. They will likely have a “missing” designation, since odrive can’t find the path.

O Drive opens and stays open with the drive disconnected.

When I reconnect the drive, O Drive stays open.

When I go to Sync to O Drive and select “directory_name (missing)” O Dive crashes in 3-4 seconds.

Does this mean all hope is lost?? Can I cancel my Premium subscription?

Hi @alastair.tye.samson,
I’ve been thinking about this and we may be able to use this method to prevent this from happening. It will disable fsevents on the volume, which means odrive may not pick up changes on the drive as quickly, however it may allow things to work.
The information comes from this doc on fsevents: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/FSEvents_ProgGuide/FileSystemEventSecurity/FileSystemEventSecurity.html

Basically, you need to create an empty file in the .fseventsd folder at the root of the volume. So running this from the terminal should work:

touch /Volumes/[volumenamehere]/.fseventsd/no_log

Can you give that a shot?

Thanks for looking into this! I created that file, rebooted, and O Drive is still crashing :cry:

Hmm, okay. I need to look into this more then. This should’ve worked to prevent fsevents on that drive, which is what seems to be the root of this issue.

I suppose it is possible that there are still some events cached in there, and those are still being read.

Can you try removing the .fseventsd folder completely from the drive, then creating an empty .fseventsd folder and an empty no_log file inside? Then disconnect the drive, start up odrive, and then plug the drive back in and see if it is any better. If it crashes again, see if there is anything new in the .fseventsd folder.

In the meantime I will do some more digging.

Hi @alastair.tye.samson,
I looked at this some more and it looks like the no_log parameter will only disable the caching of events on the Volume, but not the real-time events, themselves. It also doesn’t seem to work quite right, anyway, from my testing.

Here is a alternative workaround to hopefully get you back syncing. With odrive not running (not difficult in your case), run this terminal command:
sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.fseventsd.plist

This will stop the fsevents daemon. Start odrive, which should start up and run normally. Make sure syncing has resumed. You should then be able to start the fsevents daemon again with this command:
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.fseventsd.plist

Since odrive sets up its listener at the start, it will not be tapped into fsevents and, subsequently, MacOS can’t send the malformed events for the external drive to odrive. Not ideal, but I believe it should work.

1 Like

Sir!! This worked!!

Thank you so much — I really appreciate your help and support.

Glad you are syncing again! We are going to try to figure out a more elegant solution for this problem.