Incorrect version of 1Password mini

bernica
bernica
Community Member
edited March 2015 in Mac

Hello 1P people,
First I'd like to thank you very much for your nice work around 1Password.
I use 1Password since several years, and today on the machines descripted below :
1 iMac 27-inch, late 2012, Mac OS 10.10.2, 1PW v.5.1 bought on Mac Store
1 iPhone 5, iOS 8.1.3
1 iPad air, iOS 8.1.3

Lately, after launching 1PW launch on my iMac, I've got the following alert (in perfect french, thank you for that) :

Incorrect version of 1P mini launched… ?
Your message says that I have on my Mac more than 1 copy of 1PW.
In fact, I have permanently on-line several disks, daily cloning my system disk by Carbon Copy Cloner.

Maybe the problem could appear because of that… Maybe…
Your alert says that the problem is concerning 1Password mini, that I use.
I can't afford to get red of my Carbon Copy Cloner facility. Which is running every night.

What would be your advice… ?
Should I give you more information about my configuration ?
Thank you very much by advance for your wise indications.

Bernard Cadier
[email address removed to prevent spam]

Comments

  • hawkmoth
    hawkmoth
    Community Member
    edited March 2015

    I edited your post to remove your email address. This is a public forum, and I doubt you want to encourage the spambots to find you.

    This is related to a problem that Yosemite created. It is now allowing 1Password to search more widely than it should when starting up mini. In all likelihood, your backup copies are the source of this error. The AgileBits folks have been advising users to exclude the 1Password app from backups when the backup volumes are always mounted. I followed that advice, omitting the application from my TimeMachine and Carbon Copy Cloner backups. And I also removed it from my existing backups. I haven't had anymore trouble.

    A couple of days ago someone here was wondering if preventing Spotlight from searching the backup drives would accomplish the same thing. I have now done that, but I had already removed the 1Password backups and instructed TimeMachine and CCC not to back up the application. So I don't know if the Spotlight exclusion helped. I'd be interested to know if you have excluded your backup drives from Spotlight searches. If you haven't, you might try it and let us know how it goes.

  • littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables
    1Password Alumni

    Hi @bernica,

    Please do let us know if you find hawkmoth's post helpful. I'm not a Carbon Copy Cloner user myself but if you can exclude just the 1Password application (which it sounds like you can based on hawkmoth's post) then that, along with deleting just the application from the backups, would be sufficient.

    The issue is Yosemite. You could run 1Password 4 in Mavericks and have no trouble. Run 1Password 4 in Yosemite and you won't get that error, but you will get the issues that the error message is trying to avoid. At the moment it's the best we can do, which is to warn you when it happens. I know, not great but at some point we hope Apple can resolve this.

    Let us know how you get along.

  • hawkmoth
    hawkmoth
    Community Member
    edited March 2015

    @littlebobbytables - Yes, you can exclude a particular item from backup by Carbon Copy Cloner. It takes some rummaging around in the settings for automatic backups.

  • danco
    danco
    Volunteer Moderator

    If you are cloning manually, you could always keep your external disks unmounted except when you are ready to clone.

    If you clone on a schedule, I don't know about Carbon Copy Cloner but note that SuperDuper (which is the other main cloner) automatically mounts unmounted drives at the scheduled time, so maybe CCC does the same, in which case again you do not need the drives mounted.

  • littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables
    1Password Alumni

    It sounds like one way or another there should be almost a plethora of ways to work around this particular Yosemite quirk :smile:

  • bernica
    bernica
    Community Member

    Thank you all for your wise comments. Finally I inhibited the occurence of 1PW on every partition previously cloned. Works fine now. 1 single occurence of 1PW and the problem now seems to be solved. Thank you all again.

  • hawkmoth
    hawkmoth
    Community Member
    edited March 2015

    @bernica and others who may be interested:

    Just reporting back to say that if you use the advanced settings in Carbon Copy Cloner, you can instruct it to unmount the backup drive after the backup is complete. The documentation also says that CCC will attempt to mount the proper disk before it begins a scheduled backup. I'm going to give these options a try. Assuming they work as billed, it should be OK to back up 1Password.

  • littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables
    1Password Alumni

    Great to hear you've tamed Yosemite @bernica and I know we'll all be interested in your findings @hawkmoth :smile:

  • hawkmoth
    hawkmoth
    Community Member
    edited March 2015

    @littlebobbytables and other interested parties: I have found that the option in Carbon Copy Cloner to dismount a volume after backup works as it is supposed to. If I manually initiate another backup, the drive does remount and backup proceeds normally.

    For my own purposes, though, I ask CCC to shut down my computer after its daily backup is done in the middle of the night. The next day, when I restart the computer, the backup volume remounts during startup, as do any other attached volumes. There are procedures that one can use to prevent a volume from mounting on startup, but they involve discovering the UUID and adding a line to a configuration file via the Terminal. Google will put you in touch with that process, if you're interested. It doesn't appear to be difficult, but I'm not sure the average user would want to muck around in the OS this way. I think I'm just going to keep 1Password out of my CCC daily backups and call it good enough. If I didn't prefer to restart daily, the volume would remain unmounted, though, so for users who seldom restart, this may not matter.

    Edit: Here is a link from c|net with directions for preventing a volume from mounting on startup.

  • littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables
    1Password Alumni

    That's some brilliant work, thank you @hawkmoth not just from us but all the users I can imagine that will find this useful.

    Given you can always download 1Password from our site or Apple's MAS I'm not sure there is much benefit in keeping the applications in backups, it isn't like the gauntlet you sometimes have to run with a Windows box.

  • danco
    danco
    Volunteer Moderator

    I think the problem is that different backup programs make it more or less difficult to exclude specific files. With both SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner the default easy method is to backup everything (except things that the program itself excludes). I use SuperDuper, and have never got to terms with the mechanism for excluding items; I believe this is easy in CCC.

  • @danco,

    Yeah, this is unfortunate. I still have 2-3 more things that I have to try from our side to see if we can work around this problem. It's a really tough one. We haven't seen any movement from Apple's side to give us hope that they're fixing this soon, so we should try again from ours.

    Rick

  • batrico
    batrico
    Community Member

    Sure seems like 1Password should be instead checking the path of the app to be sure it's on the startup disk before launching the mini app; it's almost as if it's hardwired to the last instance it opened. You blame Yosemite, but this happens on Mavericks as well with the old 1P.

    I suppose there may be instances where particular users have their applications stored elsewhere than the startup disk, but there just should NOT be any reason for it to launch itself from a clone drive that, in my case, is only being mounted via CCC for the period of the clone itself, then is (or would be, if the wrong 1PM file weren't open) dismounting the clone automatically. Instead, CCC respects the open files, and leaves the volume mounted, making it vulnerable to damage in the event of a crash. It also makes it very difficult and tedious to manually dismount, without doing a Force Eject of the volume, which, unless you've done an LSOF in terminal first, is a nerve-wrecking proposition to a newbie. Nor is the critic message 1P displays at all helpful; if you now there's a conflicted version running, then you should darn well be able to script that dialog to kill the wrong instance, and restart the correct insane for the user.

    I was finally forced to write a post flight shell script for all my clone jobs to knock out this problem, and it's nothing i should have had to do.

    Nor is asking users to exclude 1P from full backups (despite the ease in which it can be redownloaded), nor is asking them to exclude volumes from Spotlight for which they may well depend on Spotlight to have.

    Please fix this.

    Thanks

    F

  • hawkmoth
    hawkmoth
    Community Member

    I'm reasonably sure that if you reread the post just above yours, @batrico, you will notice that @rickfillion said that the developers are indeed trying to do just what you just asked. I don't think anyone at AgileBits thinks the suggested work arounds are ideal or good enough. But they do work until another more elegant solution is found.

  • littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables
    1Password Alumni

    Hi @batrico,

    This issue didn't affect Mavericks though or at least we've had zero reports during the lifetime of Mavericks. 1Password 4 would run without issue on Mavericks yet display the same problem in Yosemite that 1Password 5 currently does.

    The issue doesn't just affect backup disks but also affects multiple copies some users have on their startup disk so that check alone will not solve the issue. Many users hit by this simply weren't aware they had a second copy of 1Password in their Downloads folder for example. A well behaved Mac application shouldn't make any assumptions about where it is stored and we should be able to use a relative path to launch 1Password mini which resides in our application bundle. As to the specifics of why this isn't the case we would need a dev to reply in more detail.

    Until either Apple resolve this or Rick finds a workaround in code though we're limited to the solutions above.

This discussion has been closed.