Where are items stored in print queue?

See if this will help...

Open System Preferences > Print & Scan then select the Print tab.

Click: Open Print Queue...

I think the misunderstanding is in using the term printer cache. I am not sure what you mean by that. I took a look at Onyx in Lion and the only item I could find that might be what you mean is CUPS jobs. Is this what you mean?

At least in Lion, when only the CUPS jobs was checked, it did not delete the jobs that were queued up to print.

The only way to be sure if yoiur print jobs were retained is to use the Terminal command:

sudo ls /private/var/spool/cups

You will be prompted for your password which will not appear as you type it. Any files that begin with the letter "d" are your queued print jobs. Any files that begin with the letter "c" are the parameters for the corresponding print job.

If you don't find any queued print jobs by using that Terminal command, you have lost your print jobs. Time Machine does not back up any of the spooled jobs or the control files from /var/spool/cups.

tomfromflagstaff wrote:

Yes, I assume that the CUPS job is what caused my difficulty.

And they are gone.

As I mentioned, I only tried Onyx in 10.7.x. Deleting the cache for the CUPS jobs did not actually remove a print job I had spooled. I was able to "see" the file beginning the the "d" in /private/var/spool/cups and move it to my Desktop.

Did you try the Terminal comand I had in my last post to see if there are any files in the spool directory? You will not be able to see the files themselves as even administrators do not have enough privileges to view that directory. The best you can do is use the sudo command to list the files.

The long and short of it is that if the files are not in /private/var/spool/cups, they are gone.

If I understand you correctly, restoring my system to the Time Machine back-up prior to performing this maintenance will not restore my system to it's state (including these print files) at the time of the back-up? How can that be? My understanding was that Time Machine backed-up everything.

Are there other vital files that Time Machine does not back up?

That is my understanding based on what I see in 10.7.x. Time Machine does not back up any caches or any of the files in /private/var/spool/cups. Time Machine will also not back up any other caches or system logs. I don't have a list of what it does not back up. I am not even sure if there is such a list available to users.

Dear Matt,

I too would like to backup my print queue. I usually keep print jobs in the queue for a couple of weeks and then print them all at once. twice, I have lost the queue and it's quite troublesome when that happens.

if I were to backup the /spool/cups/ directory, would that allow me to restore the queue if I needed to? would I need additional terminal commands to get the printer driver to notice the restored jobs?

sincerely,

Gregory

(Mountain Lion 10.8.5)

Thanks the info folks! I had a similar need. The contents of CUPS are indeed the unprinted queue docs, PDFs apparently. I didn't figure out how to return them to the queue (so easy in the old days!), but can add the PDF extension and archive.

Hey Matt, so what if I have those files that start with a "d" such as:

To proceed, enter your password, or type Ctrl-C to abort.

Password:

c00005 c00016 cache d00011-001 d00023-001

c00006 c00017 d00001-001 d00013-001 d00024-001

c00007 c00018 d00002-001 d00014-001 d00025-001

c00008 c00019 d00003-001 d00015-001 d00026-001

c00009 c00020 d00004-001 d00016-001 tmp

c00010 c00021 d00005-001 d00017-001

c00011 c00022 d00006-001 d00018-001

How do I recover them?