Message "The variable previous settings is not defined" - please explain

[mypointofview]

I have set up Cocktail (all possible cleaning actions - am I doing "overkill"?) to run (every day at around midnight) 1.5 hours before SuperDuper starts (once a week and smart updating about 150 GB). Usually Cocktail is finished when SD starts.

This morning I wake up my Mac and see Cocktail still doing its work - apparently being stuck - progress bar still running (I forgot which process).

The SuperDuper window was up too and was stuck with the first command "preparing the drive". Also a warning message (with an AppleScript icon) was on my desktop saying "The variable previous settings is not defined" with the header "Copy Job" in the title bar. I clicked OK (or whatever the default button on that window was) but the warning window did not go away.

So I quit Cocktail (I had to use ActivityMonitor, the Macintosh built-in utility - for those who might not know) -- then I waited a bit hoping that SuperDuper would continue its work.

I waited 5 minutes and since nothing advanced with the first step in SuperDuper's work (which usually just takes 2 seconds!!!) -- I tried to quit SuperDuper. This is where the warning came up, like "... would leave your computer in an unknown state..." which made me scared, so I cancelled that window. I waited another 5 minutes and since nothing advanced I went ahead and said OK to that warning, accepting that my Mac is now in an "unknown state" (?!).

I tried to reboot my Mac (which got stuck in the restart procedure but maybe out of other reasons?) so I force restarted.

I thought of running DiskWarrior and TechTool from another partition before doing anything else, but since I had to do some work I didn't (yet). So now I run SuperDuper again -- and it worked.

Basically there's no practical problem since all works, but I'm really curious what happened. It would probably be useful to change Cocktail to running AFTER SuperDuper -- but the time that SD takes is even more unpredictable.

My questions are:

1. What's this with that "unknow state" -- is it something to be really, really worried about?

2. What about that warning which I couldn't click away which said "The variable previous settings is not defined"?

Thanks,


Martin