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Troubleshooting Print Archiving

THE PAGE APPLIES TO:

“Help! We’re not able to see the Print Archiving Thumbnails in PaperCut. What should we check?”

Is Print Archiving enabled?

This feature is not enabled by default and requires the open source software program “Ghost Trap” installed on the Print server. First make sure Print Archiving is enabled by following these steps in our manual.

Also, make sure that Print Archiving hasn’t been intentionally disabled in PaperCut for the specific printer or user in question.

Does the user have permissions to view the archived print jobs?

PaperCut Print Archiving is a powerful feature that allows an administrator to view all documents printed through PaperCut. By default only the internal admin account in PaperCut has permissions to view archived print job. This means that even users given administrator access within the PaperCut Administration Console will not automatically have permissions to view archived print jobs.

If another specific user requires access to view archived jobs, the built in PaperCut administrator can assign these permissions by logging into the PaperCut Administration Console, and going to Options → Admin Rights. From there, choose the user you would like to give access to view archived jobs, and enable the Access archived jobs option under the List of Admin Rights.

Is there enough disk space left on the server?

Print archiving will stop if the server starts to run low on disk space. Check “Size Management” under the Print Archiving settings in PaperCut to adjust the threshold and make sure that your server has adequate disk space.

Are the print jobs a supported PDL?

PaperCut Print archiving supports the most common Page Description Languages (PDL) for printing spool files, including EMF, PCL5, PCL6, PDF, PostScript, and XPS, as documented on our Supported Printers page. If the PDL or Datatype is unknown or unsupported, the print job will pass through but will not be archived. Usually printer manufactures make a PostScript or PCL driver available, and this is what we recommend using to ensure the highest degree of compatibility with PaperCut.

For example, Canon UFR/UFR II is not a supported PDL for Print Archiving. This is due to UFR being a proprietary PDL and therefore cannot be interpreted by GhostTrap in order to generate the required image preview for recorded UFR spool files.

You can check for yourself what PDL is being used by a particular driver in PaperCut by looking at attributes column of the job log. In the example below a Canon UFR driver results in the message “Unable to convert this page to an image due to a conversion error”.

Thankfully, most manufacturers make a PostScript or PCL driver available which will provide the best results with Print Archiving. The PaperCut Global Print Driver may be a suitable alternative as well.

Are these print jobs from a secondary PaperCut Server?

There are some additional steps that sometimes get overlooked when a PaperCut Secondary Server is involved. Double check the steps on this page to confirm that you have set up the Central Archive and that the Print Provider service is configured correctly.

  • Make sure the Print Provider on the secondary server is upgraded to the same version as the PaperCut server.
  • Make sure the Print Provider service is started on the Secondary Server and is running as a domain user or service account that has read/write privileges to the Central Archive.
  • If this spontaneously stopped working recently, make sure the service account password has not expired or been changed.
  • Confirm that print-provider.conf file has been updated with the correct path for the Central Archive.

Are these jobs being printed from a workstation with the Direct Print Monitor?

Both the PaperCut Secondary Server and the Direct Print Monitor utilize a service called the “Print Provider” to track jobs, but one big difference is that the Direct Print Monitor does not support Print Archiving. When Direct Printing mode is enabled, the Print Provider ignores the Print Archiving settings and will not archive jobs.

The manual states here: “The following options are not available on a direct print queue: Google Cloud Print, Email to Print, Web Print (users may upload documents to print), Print Archiving”.

Why is this the case? The Print Archiving feature relies on write files to a file share, which is not practical in large environments. Each workstation would need to have the Print Provider running as a service account with permissions to write to the server share which hosts the Central Archive. We imagine this could cause pains in slow networks or when clients running the Direct Print Monitor are unable to connect to the share.

For simplicity, if you require Print Archiving we recommend setting up a PaperCut Secondary Server.

Further Troubleshooting

To understand what’s going on it really helps for us to have a look at the logs. For the next steps help us help you by collecting the following:

Then share that with your PaperCut Support person for analysis.


Still not working?

Let us know! We love chatting about what’s going on under the hood. Feel free to leave a comment below or visit our Support Portal for further assistance.


Categories: Troubleshooting Articles , Print Archiving


Keywords: Print job archiving , archive , permissions , administrator , missing archive , don’t show , no picture

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Last updated March 15, 2024