When I first migrated to this new phone, the daily update worked, but then it never completed again.
I can see each day there’s a new export file created, so it is technically working, but looks like it is busying to update some old daily exports (I didn’t touch old days in the Arc app for a while by the way).
Ah this old trap. For some reason iOS gets into a state where it will consistently “expire” some of the scheduled background tasks just before they actually finish their work, even if they typically finish in a reasonable amount of time.
In this case, if it looks like all the export files are there, and the newest ones have modification dates that look sensible and up to date, then I wouldn’t worry about it. Presumably the task is getting the files updated enough that they’re up to date. It’ll just be that it has a little bit more work on one file or another to do, then iOS decides to “expire” the task before that last bit gets done.
A similar thing can happen sometimes with the main iCloud Drive Backups task. It will be getting the job 99% done each day, to the point where it’s not a concern, but iOS will be expiring the task just short of finishing, so it gets noted down in the app as not having been fully completed in a long while.
This is one of those cases where it would probably help a lot to have Arc calculate a percentage complete, and show that instead of the “last completed” date. It would be more comforting to know that it’s 99% complete each day, instead of being told it’s a month or more out of date.
But in most cases that percent complete calculation is quite energy expensive or difficult to do. And doing it would extend the amount of time it would take to actually complete the task! So as nice as it would be, it would be partially self defeating. No easy wins there.
The actual daily export is generated as usual, just the task is not completing. Is it possible to somehow “manage state” of tasks so it can continue after iOS decides to expire it?
For the iCloud Drive Backups task, Arc will run that task in the foreground when plugged in to power, if it hasn’t fully completed within the past 48 hours (or some threshold around there).
For the other tasks, absolute completion isn’t usually important and “almost there” is good enough, so there’s no mechanism for running the task outside of iOS’s scheduled tasks system.
In Arc Editor (the Arc Timeline app rebuild) I might provide some more detailed control over the tasks from debug views. But ultimately it’s not super important. Even for the iCloud Drive Backups, 99% there is good enough, and no harm will come from it not being fully completed each day.
It’s best to just ignore it unless something is actually going wrong. Though I’ll admit that it does still bother me when I see it in the debug views!
