TNCS-0040 – Understanding the Readiness State
Created: May 21, 2018
ChronoSync introduced the “Readiness State” in version 4.0. As the name implies, the Readiness State conveys how “ready” your ChronoSync Task is to be be executed.
There are three types of messages that can be displayed as part of the readiness state: errors, warnings and “configured and ready,” the latter indicating there are no errors or warnings.
Any error presented in the readiness state indicates a serious issue that will prevent the execution from occurring. These are conditions for which ChronoSync cannot recover. For instance, if your destination target is a read-only volume, a “volume is read-only” readiness error is displayed. You will not be able to run this task unless you switch to another volume or re-mount the volume as read-write.
A warning that is presented in the readiness state indicates a condition that may or may not be serious, but does not present a condition that would prevent the task from executing. For example, if your source target has a case sensitive file system but your destination doesn’t, a readiness warning will be presented calling your attention to this fact. This may or may not be an issue, depending on how you have chosen to name your files on the source target.
In all cases, it should be your goal to eliminate every readiness message and achieve the “configured and ready” state before running your tasks. ChronoSync 4.7 introduced an easy way to accomplish this, even in cases where the readiness warnings are presented for conditions you have no control over. Consider the following example:
Here we are backing up to an SD card that is formatted FAT32 so it can be used on Windows-based computers. The readiness warnings are all related to the fact that FAT32 imposes limitations that the native Mac file system on the source target does not have. At this point you can reformat the SD card as HFS+ to get rid of the warnings. If you need to transfer this SD card between operating systems, however, you have no choice but to leave it formatted as FAT32 and live with the warnings.
Your backup task will run just fine as long as you don’t have files that cannot be copied to FAT32 volumes (e.g. ones that use illegal Windows characters like ‘\’). However, leaving the messages visible will desensitize you to warnings and you may therefore miss a serious condition that can occur down the road. To account for this, ChronoSync allows you to dismiss the warnings. Simply move your mouse over the warning messages and you will see some (X) icons appear next to each message.
These are buttons and, when you click them, ChronoSync gives you the option to ignore that warning.
If you ignore all the warnings, which is acceptable in this case, your backup task will reach the “Configured and ready” state.
You’ll notice that a ‘Reset’ icon now appears next to “Readiness State.” This is your indication that there are ignored messages. You can always reset them by clicking that icon.
ChronoSync will automatically reset the warnings if you ever change targets or it has detected some other major change in one of your targets.
Now that all warnings have been ignored, a legitimate warning will stand out should it occur. Here the same backup task has encountered a warning after it has been repeatedly run:
This represents a condition that you will want to address by deleting files or changing to a larger SD card. Had you been desensitized to readiness warnings, you may not have noticed it until you ran out of space on the destination.
If you are in another panel in your task document window, you can view the readiness state at the lower left corner of the window. Clicking the icon will display any problems.
You can then switch back to the Setup Panel to address the warnings in the Readiness State box.
Many readiness warnings represent conditions that can be dealt with by reconfiguring your Task Document. When such is the case, ChronoSync provides the option to automatically fix the problem my modifying the appropriate setting. For example, here is a common scenario when backing up to a file server or NAS device:
In this case, the first three warnings have the standard (X) icon displayed when you mouse-over the messages. They represent conditions that are intrinsic to the destination device and can only be eliminated by ignoring them or changing the type of device you are backing up to.
The last two warnings, however, display small “wrench” icons. Clicking those icons provide the option to “Fix” the problem.
Clicking “Fix” will make the appropriate change to your backup task and will remove the warnings from the Readiness State.
Ignoring the remaining three warnings put the backup task into the “Configured and Ready” state:
Keeping an eye on each task document’s readiness state can inform you of any serious issues that need to be addressed. It’s an important tool in keeping your task error free. If you have further questions concerning Readiness messages, please contact support and we’ll be happy to help!
REVISION HISTORY
May-21-2018 – Created from Scratch.