I am having a very frustrating problem with Knox Filevaults. When trying to back up data to 2 different external harddrives, I constantly get the following message: “Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred (Error code -41)!” At times, the vault works fine. The hard drives are connected via FW800. I can copy small
files, only a few Kb is size, but if trying to copy anything that’s a few Mb
in size, it chokes. I’ve turned off all other processes when using
this vault, even closing down all other users. I’ve ejected and turned the
filevault and the hard drive off and back on, I’ve force quit the finder, etc., with no success. I have restarted the computer and the external hard drives many times, ran maintenance scripts, repaired permissions, and nothing seems to make a difference. I have checked the drives with disk utility and they check out fine. When the vault works, it works well, but it gives me the “-41” error message at completely unpredictable times. At times, it’s after it’s warmed up, at other times it’s immediately after a cold restart. It sometimes works well for awhile, then gives me the error message. I can occasionally copy folders that are a couple of hundred megabites or so and it will work fine for a bit, then chokes. I usually resort to copy folders file at a time, since it seems to last longer that way. That’s very time consuming. I don’t have any confidence to think that I could try to copy a large folder full of files and folders or multiple folders at the same time. It didn’t seem to occur until the filevault had over 400Gb of data on it. One hard drive is a 1Tb drive, the other is a 750Gb drive. Both file vaults are set to stretch to size of volume. I initially thought it was the hard drive and even purchased another hard drive, spent hours copying data to it, more hours securely erasing data on first drive, then more time and money shipping back the suspect drive, only to have it start doing the same thing on the new drive after it hit over 400 Gb of data!!! I now know it’s related to the Knox filevault, because I can copy data to the same hard drive OUTSIDE the filevault and it copies just fine! If you try to copy from the same hard drive back to the filevault, you get the same error 41 “could not complete because unexpected error occurred”! I’m now stuck because my computer hard drive is full and I can’t back up to the Knox file vault. Frustrating.

I hope you can provide me with a solution, as Knox has become
practically worthless to me.”

Addendum: It should also be noted that I can create a second FileVault on the same external hard drive and it will copy data just fine. Seems to be something to do with the size of the vault creating the error message. The second FileVault will serve as a “Plan B” for now, but isn’t ideal.

Error -41 is a “memory full” error in Mac OS X (meaning RAM as opposed to hard disk space). We haven’t encountered this problem ourselves but be also tend to use vaults that are much smaller than the sizes you mention.

Would there be a way for you to divide the data into multiple vaults? That’s really what Knox’s user interface is geared towards.

Well, it was my impression that you indicated in the past that Knox would stretch to the size of the available disk space. Is that not true? Dividing into multiple vaults somewhat defeats the purpose for me, since I need to compare files at times and that adds another step to things.
If there is a limit to the size of Knox FileVaults, I wish I had been told that in advance, since it has caused me a great deal of aggravation, time, and money thinking something was wrong with the hard drive!

We have not encountered any real-world limit to the size of Knox vaults, but, seeing that your problem seems to be related to the size of the vaults, I suggested dividing up your storage into multiple vaults as a workaround.

Knox vaults are Mac OS X encrypted disk images, and the error you are seeing is being generated by the operating system rather than by Knox. As it refers to memory being full, how much RAM do you have? What kinds of applications are you typically running? Which Mac OS X version is this happening on?

I am using OS X 10.4.1, I have 1G of RAM. As I said in my initial post, I have shut down all other applications, all other users and it makes no difference. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Only occurs when trying to copy into a Knox FileVault that is over 400Gb. Can copy any size file outside vault onto same hard drive without problem (didn’t realize this until I had sent back a hard drive I thought was defective!).
As far as Error-41, I have searched everywhere and there are different things that that particular error can mean from what I’ve been able to find and have been told after consulting with others that are knowledgeable about macs.