Crash recovery messages in SuperDuper log

TidBITS Talk
1

When I use SuperDuper to make a clone of my MacBook Pro 2017 15-in (macOS 10.14.6), in the resulting log, about five minutes after the copying begins, the following message occurs:

| 11:14:27 PM | Info | Ignoring
/private/var/audit/20150725033113.crash_recovery

The message repeats with a different 14-digit number about 2,500 (sic) times, then the time changes to 11:14:28 PM and repeats about 150 more times.

Any idea what is causing this?

Is it something I should be concerned about?

Thank you,

David

2

The developer is very responsive to users’ questions and very knowledgeable. You might try asking him.

3

Yes – as you say, he is very responsive, but he only said that I had a lot of those files.

My question is, what is causing such a large number of them?

David

4

… or what CAUSED them. The example you cited is named with a date and time four years ago.

5

I somehow didn’t realize that number was a date.

Now I see that the latest instances are six of them from August 6, 2019.

David

6

Here’s a post from 2011 about a different problem with similarly named files in /private/var/audit/ that has some terminal commands for deleting them:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/12735/os-x-private-folder-runaway-file-crash-recovery-126-61gb

As an experiment in living dangerously, while logged in as root I went into that folder and found that I have a bunch of similarly named files. One of them appears to be a “current” file, but there aren’t files for every single day. There were maybe 50 or 60 files in total, although I didn’t actually count them. None of them were older than August, 2018, so maybe by default the files should be automatically deleted after 1 year and that isn’t happening for you. As a test, I highlighted all of the files from 2018, moved them to the trash and successfully emptied the trash. So far, nothing’s happened. My guess is that if SuperDuper ignores the files, and you can boot okay from a SuperDuper clone, they are files you don’t need.