Primary Armory Feature Fail: cannot make wallet backup

[taunofargis]

I have been using the core Bitcoin client until now but was interested in some of the features of Armory - primarily the magical wallet backup feature.  I just installed current version of Armory (0.92.3) and find that I cannot make a printed wallet backup at all.  Actually, I made one when the wallet first got generated, but I didn't choose the "use secure print" option.  Deciding that Armory was worth trying, I attempted to make a SecurePrint(tm) backup, but it fails.  In fact, all attempts to make a wallet backup fail, SecurePrint(tm) or otherwise.

When I choose to make a printed backup, I progress through the "Print Wallet Backup" dialog and preview, but when I click "Print..." and get the OS print dialog, I cannot click on any of the controls on that dialog.  I get beeps on each click.  It's like some other window has focus.  The only thing I can do is choose "Cancel" from the "Print Wallet Backup" dialog which dismisses that window, and after some delay, the OS print dialog as well.  No backup ever gets generated.

The OS is OS X 10.10.1 and both Armory and the Bitcoin core clients are at their latest respective versions.

This smells like a pretty serious bug on a core feature of the product, and a bug that is a show-stopper for me.  There is no other Armory feature that (for me) justifies the downsides of Armory (the doubling of the block chain storage requirements and overall slow performance, not to mention the, ahem, less than ideal qt ui).

Can anyone else duplicate this bug or comment on alternative methods to generate a SecurePrint(tm) wallet backup?

[picobit]

Is that bug back again?

It is not a bug in Armory itself, but in the Qt toolkit that Armory is built upon - not that that helps you, of course.  Last time it appeared was when Apple updated OS X, it took ages before the Qt toolkit (or OS X) was fixed.  

The bad news is that there is probably not anything the Armory developers can do about it - unless they have learned a few magic tricks since last time, which of course is entirely possible.

The good news is that there is a slightly inconvenient workaround.  You only need to backup your Armory wallet once, ever.  So you can manually copy the codes from the sheet to be printed to a piece of paper.  I have moved a wallet from one offline computer to another in this way once, it did not take long.  Of course you need to test your backup extra carefully in that case, but you should always do that anyway, and Armory makes that easy.  And you don't need to worry about your printer caching the private keys

That being said, it is a weak point for Armory that OS X support is only given low priority by the developers of the QT toolkit.  But there is next to nothing they can do about it.


EDIT for the developers: I am still running OS X 10.9.5.  And Armory 0.92.3-beta.  That combination works flawlessly.

[goatpig]

I have been using the core Bitcoin client until now but was interested in some of the features of Armory - primarily the magical wallet backup feature.  I just installed current version of Armory (0.92.3) and find that I cannot make a printed wallet backup at all.  Actually, I made one when the wallet first got generated, but I didn't choose the "use secure print" option.  Deciding that Armory was worth trying, I attempted to make a SecurePrint(tm) backup, but it fails.  In fact, all attempts to make a wallet backup fail, SecurePrint(tm) or otherwise.

When I choose to make a printed backup, I progress through the "Print Wallet Backup" dialog and preview, but when I click "Print..." and get the OS print dialog, I cannot click on any of the controls on that dialog.  I get beeps on each click.  It's like some other window has focus.  The only thing I can do is choose "Cancel" from the "Print Wallet Backup" dialog which dismisses that window, and after some delay, the OS print dialog as well.  No backup ever gets generated.

The OS is OS X 10.10.1 and both Armory and the Bitcoin core clients are at their latest respective versions.

This smells like a pretty serious bug on a core feature of the product, and a bug that is a show-stopper for me.  There is no other Armory feature that (for me) justifies the downsides of Armory (the doubling of the block chain storage requirements and overall slow performance, not to mention the, ahem, less than ideal qt ui).

Can anyone else duplicate this bug or comment on alternative methods to generate a SecurePrint(tm) wallet backup?

Make a ticket, attach your log files, our Mac maintainer will look at it.

https://support.bitcoinarmory.com/home

[doug_armory]

Is that bug back again?

I'll take a look at the bug soon. That said, your explanation was pretty much on the money. I did have to tweak a bit of code a year ago in order to get OSX printing to work at all. It did work at the time, though.

Regarding OSX 10.10, there may be some issues under 0.92.3. I really can't do anything about that due to how Armory is packaged. I have a solution in the dev build, though, and I think a new version of Qt with official 10.10 support is supposed to come out soon. I'll fold that in ASAP.