Noodlesoft Forums

Hi Nr. Noodle-

(I actually started this thread two years ago, but things intervened.) I created a rule to sync backups of my wife's knitting files to Dropbox. As you can see, everything passed.

However, it doesn't sync automatically - though when I tell Hazel to sync manually, it works fine! So I enabled Debug, as you recommend, and extracted this from the logs:

2019-03-25 12:45:35.173 hazelworker[43783] knitting: Rule Sync Knitting Folder matched.
2019-03-25 12:45:35.887 hazelworker[43783] [Error] Could not sync file/folder: Could not sync file/folder at knitting to /Users/Marie/Dropbox/knitting.
2019-03-25 12:45:35.887 hazelworker[43783] Sync returned error status: 23

Strangely, other Hazel rules sync to Dropbox without problems, though for those, things are not so deeply nested. Perhaps a problem with the rule? Of course, I can send you the debug log if you'd like.

Thanks,
Chip

It's probably a problem with a file being synced. Try turning on debug mode as described here: https://www.noodlesoft.com/kb/hazel-debug-mode/

Post/email the logs after that. It should point out which file it had problems with.

I emailed the logs to Paul (alias Mr. Noodle) and received the following reply:

I think it’s a coincidence that it seem when manually run as I see another manual run where it fails.
It has to do with not being able to access metadata on some PDF files in the 2019_KAL folder. I’m not sure if those were recently added or if Dropbox is in the middle of syncing those items. It may well be a temporary problem as later syncing succeeds. You might want to add a condition like “date is not in the last X minutes” to delay processing to give it some time for the state of the files to settle down.

…so I added the rules
If date last added is not in the last 20 minutes
If date last modified is not in the last 20 minutes
…and after a week it seems to be working! If something goes wonky again, I will post the issue here so others can benefit (and maybe save Paul some hassle). Frankly, I don't see why it works, since the probability of Hazel running the rule while the file is being uploaded seems small. Then again, my Physics prof used to say, "Experiment beats theory every time".
Kudos again to Mr. Noodle!