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Troubleshooting Print Archiving

This page applies to:

Is Print Archiving enabled?

This feature is not enabled by default and requires the open source software program “Ghost Trap” to be installed on the Print server. First make sure Print Archiving is enabled in the PaperCut NG/MF admin interface under Options > General > Print Archiving. Refer to the Set up Print Archiving steps for more information.

Also, make sure that Print Archiving hasn’t been intentionally disabled in PaperCut for the specific printer or user in question. If this is the case, you can see an example below showing more information when hovering the mouse pointer over the broken image:

An admin can disable or override Print Archiving in the following ways:

  • Printer-level override
    • Disable archiving for a printer - under Printers > [select the printer] > Summary > Advanced Configuration > Enable Print Archiving.
  • User-level override
    • Disable archiving for a user - under Users > [select the user] > Details > Advanced Options > Override printer/device settings > Don’t archive this user’s jobs.
  • Print scripting
    • Disable archiving per-job/per-user/other from within a script - see actions.job.disableArchiving() on the Print Script API reference page.

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 NG/MF admin interface, 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 Options > General > Print Archiving > Size Management in the PaperCut NG/MF admin interface, to adjust the threshold and make sure that your server has adequate disk space.

Are the print jobs using 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.

The solution here normally boils down to ‘are you able to try using an alternative driver?’. The PaperCut Global Print Driver may be a suitable alternative as well.

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.

Other miscellaneous reasons can include:

Are the print jobs coming 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 the Advanced archiving options and features (Setting up secondary print servers or Site Servers) 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.

See Configure a directly connected printer for more information. Specifically the alert box at the bottom of the page which mentions “The following options are not available on a direct print queue” which includes “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 .

GDI printers

GDI printers (using GDI print description language) produce spool files that are proprietary binary format files and currently there is no standard technology or tools to allow the visual display of printed content, however, you can reprint GDI print jobs by downloading the spool file (see Downloading PDL/spool files for reprinting ).

There can be issues viewing some print jobs

Because of their flexibility some PostScript drivers can create spool files that cannot be rendered with the standard viewer. If you find a consistent issue with a particular printer, first see if there is an alternate driver format available (that is, another PDL language).

No archiving of off-the-glass copy jobs

Because of the level of fidelity used in modern copiers archiving off-the-glass jobs (copying at an MFD) would consume large amounts of network bandwidth and disk storage. It would also currently be difficult to provide a cross-platform solution that could work consistently with all of PaperCut’s supported platforms and devices.

Preview images can differ slightly from the printed document

Depending on the print driver used, certain attributes of preview images generated might differ slightly from those of the actual document (for example, in some cases a color print-job can have a black-and-white preview image). This is also the case when using Convert or block print jobs - conversion and restriction filters .

No watermarking in preview images

Document watermarks applied by PaperCut’s watermarking feature do not display in preview images.

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.

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