Error message popups flooding the system

[P_e_t_e_r]

System: Windows 10, BC 4.3.7

First of all: There are already several topics regarding "Popups". I hope I can add another aspect.

When a copy operation using Windows Explorer fails, I get an unhelpful message like "We couldn't copy some files", and the operation is aborted. That's why I'm using BC for large copy operations. BC logs the errors and continues. In the end, I can investigate and fix the errors.

But now the following happened during a BC copy action:

• Target disk was disconnected during copy operation (faulty hardware)
• BC created an error message in a popup window (something like "Could not create folder blah. Target disk is not accessible")
• BC tried the next file and created the next popup. And so on ...

When I went back to my PC, only one popup was displayed. After closing it, the next one appeared, and so on. I closed hundrets of them, then I gave up and killed the BC process via task manager (normal program termination was blocked by the popup). But this did not help. The popup flood did not end. Apparently the popups are in some system queue - no chance to stop them. I saw no other solution than to restart the system. But restarting the system was also blocked by the popups. So I had to turn off the system using the power button.

(BTW: This way I ended up with a non-functional system, thanks the "intelligence" of Windows 10, which always is trying to help the user and to repair something. In this case, they realized that the system had crashed, and made a BIOS reset, which sets my system disk to "Optane" mode. But my windows is installed in "AHCI" mode, so the system was dead after the BIOS reset. I was aware of this "feature" and could repair it.)

Additional information:
Both, source and target disk were connected via (probably faulty) USB hub. I'm not sure if the source or the target disk had been disconnected (or both), but I remember that the error messages referred to the target disk.


Why so much text?

• BC error handling is not very helpful in this case.
• For my use cases, it would always be better simply to log the errors (see preliminary notice at the very beginning).
• In addition, for me it would make much sense to have a setting like "Give up after xxx errors in sequence", where "xxx" could/should be user configurable (maybe under "Advanced options" or as a setting in the compare/copy/... dialog). The "xxx" counter should be resettet after each successful operation.
• There are certainly use cases where it makes sense to display a popup and to wait for user input. But then BC should really wait and not create such a popup flood.
• At least, users should be able to exit the program normally after such a flood of errors.
• Maybe it makes sense to introduce two modes (attended/unattended; selectable via checkbox in the compare/copy/... dialog) to switch on/off popups.
• In my case, an unfortunate chain of unexpected (but not very unlikely) errors resulted in a dead system. So IMHO this issue is not unimportant

[Aaron]

Thanks for the report. Most of our error handling is the internal error log that doesn't cause a pop-up, but there are some rare instances that can cause the pop-up. We'll investigate the other cases, and see if they can be suppressed or captured differently. Just being a usb drive or disconnecting isn't a direct cause (I tested unplugging my own, we can catch those); so it is probably something more specific or faulty that's triggering this case.