Basecamp 4.1.1 for MAC hangs when Time Machine backing up

Former Member over 12 years ago

I have stumbled across the reason my BaseCamp session seems to hang with just the colour wheel rotating for a few minutes at a time. It's down to the fact that Time Machine is busy updating it's backups. When it does so, it mounts the Time Machine as a volume under Finder. BaseCamp picks up that a new volume has appeared and tries to do something clever like look for maps. The result is BaseCamp hangs until Time Machine is finished and dismounts the volume. This is behaviour is new to v4.1.1.

The work around it to stop Time Machine manually (if displayed, click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar at the top of your screen and select "Stop Backing Up"). If you have the default time machine settings, you'll find yourself doing this once every hour while you are running BaseCamp!

I reported it to Garmin support and they just said:
"Unfortunately the configuration of the hardware of the Time Machine may
conflict with our software as it is a removable/virtual drive.
Unfortunately we have no control over the Time Machine configuration the
only solution we could offer is one you have already tried which would
be to temporarily disable this service while using our software."

Hope this helps someone, and Garmin sort something out to either recognise (and ignore) time machine volumes, or allow users to specify which volumes to ignore.

0 paaast over 12 years ago

I can confirm the same problem. Would it really be so hard do pre-check the mounted devices before including to basecamp? First of all time machine backups are always on hfs filesystems (as far as i know) and don´t know any garmin device which could handle this file-system. So basecamp could ignore this devices. Another way is to check if there is a garmin directory in the root directory. there are many mac apps which handle external devices, but none of them crashes or hangs if I have my time machine backup running. so please garmin fix this issue. can not be so hard.

0 azdrmn over 12 years ago

I am seeing this too, and just recently with the version of BC that became available in Feb/Mar. I have been in communication with Garmin on this. When TM kicks in and initiates a backup, BC will hang. And it is not just USB, I am using TM wirelessly, no USB involved.

Also, there are a couple versions of BC out there. Some are direct from Garmin and some are through the Apple store. Might be better to go back to the latest version of BC available from the Apple store to hopefully make sure it is an approved sandbox compliant version.

I have been using TC/TM since a few months after the first version (that means many years) was available and have not had this problem until a recent revision of BaseCamp.

We are looking into this problem, but it seems to occur for in a very narrow set of circumstances.

As for advising people to use the Apple Store version, I have some concerns:
1) Apple has proven to be increasingly difficult and slow to approve complicated applications. The app store version has lagged significantly behind the web release version.
2) The required changes to the user interface to be sandbox compliant have made for a much worse user experience. These changes were not dreamt up by Garmin. They were mandated by Apple so that we can read and write to the GPS and SD cards.
3) The number of features that the App Store version lacks because of requirements from Apple continues to grow.

Having said that, I understand and commend the goal of making for more secure applications. Unfortunately, Apple wasn't ready to fully support applications as complicated as BaseCamp when they flipped the switch requiring sandboxing.

0 azdrmn over 12 years ago

This might have been fixed in BaseCamp 4.2 beta. We made a change to fix a slightly different problem, but it should have resolved this one as well. Feel free to try it out and see if it's fixed.

Edit: I just found out the change didn't make it into this beta. It will be in the next beta or the 4.2 release.

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

Thanks for looking into this.

The standards that Apple set are why the Mac platform is simply elegant and rock solid. ... When a company complies with the software standards set by Apple, that company also provides the same simply elegant and rock solid user experience that people expect on an Apple product. Apple software standards are effectively a certification process that ensures that third party software provides the user experience that is simply elegant, productive, and rock solid.

Alas, that has not been my experience over the last ten years with Apple products and software.

I'll go with the response from the developer who has to deal with Apple's requirements.

0 N4HHE over 10 years ago

I fail to see why or how any of the problems with Base Camp are Apple's fault. Garmin wrote buggy software for the PC before their first Mac release and they continue to do so. For example Time Machine. Garmin has known about it over 18 months and 4.4.3 still has problems. Why is Garmin scanning all of my media?

Much longer than that I've posted that Base Camp can't fully connect to a GPS if the Mac's boot volume is formatted "case sensitive". That is still true. Garmin Express works but Base Camp does not.

0 schinder over 10 years ago

In what way? Whenever I get a new Mac, I wipe the drive and reformat it case sensitive. I've been using Unix much too long not to do that. Every drive connected to/in my MacPro (something like 7 at the moment) is case sensitive journaled HFS+. And I have no problems with the current BaseCamp (4.4.2), but I can't say I use it a lot. It connects with my Garmin devices just fine. Time Machine is running, and it causes no problems with BaseCamp.