First startup error "Failed to scan system volumes.undefined"

Expected Behavior

First startup after installation.

Current Behavior

First I had a blank window with the text “Internal Server Error”.

On reinstall I had the setup screen. I chose a small folder with just a handful of photos to scan manually, set the library location in a subfolder of my user, and clicked ok.

Environment

Operating system and version: Mac OS X Catalina
PhotoStructure for Desktop 0.9.1

I also have the following happening in System>Privacy>Files and Folders. It doesn’t let me check all the boxes.

Screen Shot 2021-04-29 at 2.56.54 PM

Thanks for taking the time to report this! Sorry that PhotoStructure is misbehaving for you.

I believe I’ve addressed this in v1.0.0, but it’s not released as a stable build yet. Can you try an alpha build of v1.0.0?

If you still see this error on v1.0.0-alpha.7, can you DM me the result of running diskutil info -all and df -k -P on a terminal?

If you see anything you’d rather not share in that output, feel free to replace the text with XXX.

v1.0.0-beta.2 added several new timeouts that may help you if you have several attached external drives, or lots of network mounted volumes, or if any of your volumes are especially slow to spin up from sleep.

Open your system settings.toml and add the following lines:

commandTimeoutMs=60000
mountpointsTtlMs=60000
volumeMetadataTtlMs=1200000

This will set your command and mountpoint timeouts to a minute, and volume metadata to be cached for 20 minutes.

Here are descriptions for these settings:


##############################################################################
#
# Settings for System.timeouts:
#


# +--------------------+
# |  commandTimeoutMs  |
# +--------------------+
#
# How long should PhotoStructure wait for a command that touches the
# filesystem (and doesn't do anything computationally expensive)? Note that
# external hard drives can take 10-15 seconds to spin up, so values less than
# that may result in timeouts.
#
# environment: "PS_COMMAND_TIMEOUT_MS"
#
commandTimeoutMs = 60000


# +--------------------+
# |  mountpointsTtlMs  |
# +--------------------+
#
# How frequently should PhotoStructure scan for new volumes (so PhotoStructure
# can detect when drives are inserted or ejected)? Shorter than 10-15 seconds
# may cause issues on Windows.
#
# environment: "PS_MOUNTPOINTS_TTL_MS"
#
mountpointsTtlMs = 60000


# +-----------------------+
# |  volumeMetadataTtlMs  |
# +-----------------------+
#
# How frequently should PhotoStructure reload volume metadata (like
# bytes-free, which is used in a health check?) Values less than a minute are
# probably not necessary.
#
# environment: "PS_VOLUME_METADATA_TTL_MS"
#
volumeMetadataTtlMs = 1200000

Regarding mountpointsTtlMs (How frequently should PhotoStructure scan for new volumes so PhotoStructure can detect when drives are inserted or ejected)

… can we have the option to set this to “never”?

:star: great idea. I just coded this, and it will be in beta.3.

I tried the Alpha build of v1.0.0-alpha.7 like you said. It worked.

I was experiencing disk problems with an external drive (slow reads). This seems to be the cause (as reflected in the timeouts you added for drives with these problems).

Thanks for the response.