I have a firewire drive attached to my Mac. QRecall is set to back up my files early every morning and to run a Compact and Verify weekly, following the Sunday morning back-up. I don't read the Log every day so it was not until Tuesday that I saw that Sunday's Verify had failed and that Monday and Tuesday's back-ups had run OK.

I tried to Reindex and then Repair my archive. No success. James suggested that I copy the archive to another drive. The Finder was unable to do so. After trying some other utilities, I set Data Rescue to recover what it could of my archive to a second external drive. Eventually I was rewarded by a file that QRecall's Repair was able to work on. And to start my regular back-ups again.

I then had TechTool do a surface scan of the first drive. It found a number of bad blocks. How and why these arise I don't know. Some may have gone bad after QRecall had written to them but I wouldn't know that until a Verify had run. What I have learnt is to run Verify and to check the Log more often than I have been. Perhaps I might also ask that QRecall email me the results of Verify?

-- Charles

Charles,

An e-mail notification is a good suggestion. I also plan to make errors more prominent in the monitor window, possibly forcing the window to the front when a warning or error is detected. At the very least, reopening the monitor window when an error occurs which should make it harder to miss.

I like to think of the verify action as a "peace of mind" feature. QRecall constantly checks the integrity of the archive whatever it is doing (capture, merge, recall, etc.) and will stop immediately if it finds anything amiss.

So at first blush the verify appears superfluous. But no action touches everything in an archive. The verify is the only action that ensures that everything in the archive is valid, readable, and has not been altered or corrupted in any way. I tend to schedule verifies to run at least once a week, even once a day on small archives.

Tip: If your archive is on another computer, create the verify action to run on the server. It will run much faster than it would over a network connection. The same is true for merge and compact actions.