Interesting ChronoSync Bug
I’ve been looking at a way to keep certain things on my iMac and PowerBook in sync. One of the better (apparently) applications to help with that is one called ChronoSync. Just to quote a couple of the features which sold me on that is:
- Detect deleted, moved, or renamed files and folders.
- Move deleted files to a special folder for later retrieval.
- Detect modifications in both locations and alert you of conflicts.
Perfect, a way to make sure that my Documents folder is kept in sync and that I won’t lose any of my vital work!
So I thought I’d create a new folder called Docs and give it a test run. I also created folders for Games, Music, Photos and everything you usually see within a home directory on the Mac. Check out what happened in Finder.
Every folder got renamed “Docs”. Every folder inside each “Docs” was also renamed “Docs”. Every folder in the directory above each “Docs” was, again, renamed “Docs” bar one which was right at the top and named “Backup. Uhh.. interesting. Fortunately this was just a blank external hard drive so deleting all these folders and trying again wasn’t too much of a problem. However, the problem continued to occur. Oh dear.
The age old solution to any computer or tech related issue worked wonders once again: Turn it off and back on again. After restarting my Mac it seemed to be content in moving things across nicely. Still, interesting looking bug; wonder if I’ll see it again.
Update: Joe Japes, Sales & Marketing Director of Econ Technologies, has contacted me and would like me to inform you that the problem indicated above probably does not relate to ChronoSync. I would just like to extend this to say that it probably was just a random bug and just happened but unfortunately the only application I had open at the time that was doing something was ChronoSync and then a Finder window.
While his first comment left below seemed harsher the email responses have been courteous and helpful in terms of customer support. He genuinely seemed more concerned than trying to silence a complaint.
2:39 am
Seems like a very usefull app.
11:56 pm
I am Joe the support guy for ChronoSync. Guess what! User never reported this bug to us. Furthermore this is not a ChronoSync bug. Never seen or heard of it. If it is it can be reproduced. So it would be easy to solve. But since I never heard from this user. I am in the dark. I would love to get to the bottom of it but need to be contacted.
How about some ChronoSync screenshots from the Analyze Panel to verify that CS did this.
12:32 am
Joe, this is the new world of news and I’m sorry to hear that your knickers are twisted, but Steff’s just reporting on something that happened. I would never have known about ChronoSync if it weren’t for this post and I’m sure many others wouldn’t have either. He concluded “interesting looking bug; wonder if I’ll see it again”; any reader with a hint of intelligence can see he’s still a user of your software.
I have a blog of my own and many times I post in the hope that someone will see it and think ‘I have that error too, it was because of x and y’. Thus helping me out and potentially doing a company’s bug hunting work for them. Steff said this bug got fixed by restarting his Mac, so hardly reproducible, what exactly was he meant to say in his bug report?
Also, from my personal experience in programming, to say a bug doesn’t exist because you haven’t seen or heard of it, is pretty naïve.
6:50 pm
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