I have a drive with about 950GB of large audio and video files. I back that up with QRecall, but it's on a pretty infrequent schedule and the files don't change that much. Right now the QRecall archive is 1.4 TB. When I do a compact, it says "not enough free space to do a compact" or something similar. But it's 40% bigger than the sum of the files. There may be a few 10's of GB in old layers but I can't really imagine how it gets to 1.4 TB. WAIT.. is it the redundancy? Does this sound normal?

Working backwards...

Yes, redundancy increases the size of the archive. If you selected the default redundancy level (1:8) then every eight K of data is accompanied by an additional one K of redundant information, making everything you store 12.5% bigger.

There are also meta data, index files, and other database related information in the archive which makes it bigger than the actual file data. But that typically doesn't account for more than a couple of percentage points.

The "insufficient free space" message is the compact action trying not to waste time and endanger your data by moving it around pointlessly. The compact action won't physically compact the archive unless at least 12% of the archive's database file is empty space. This prevents the compact action from moving hundreds of Gigabytes of data, only to recover 4K. You can adjust this threshold in the advanced settings ("Compact Free Space Ratio Minimum"), or you can run the compact from the QRecall menu: open the archive in the browser, then choose Archive > Compact. When run from the menu, it ignores the free space ratio.

But while you have the archive open, make sure you navigate to the root of the archive to make sure you don't have any other owners or volumes that might contain older versions of data. If you do, consider deleting the older owners/volumes (before compacting).

Finally, if you want the smallest possible archive size for files you're keeping for posterity, consider turning on compression in the archive's settings. If you up the compact compression level, then compact the archive, the entire archive will be compressed. (Note it only does this once, and once compressed it won't uncompress or recompress the data). If you still need even more space back, consider reducing the redundancy level.

I hope that helps!

You were right! There are two copies of many of the folders. How do I resolve this?

I'm backing up folders on a drive I call B1. So there's B1/Folder1, B1/Folder2 etc.

When I look at the archive, I see two pictures of a drive labeled B1. And inside each are Folder1 and Folder2, etc.. However, there are some differences in the folders in each one. When I use the timeline to narrow the view to recent captures, only one of them shows. How can I be sure it has all the files .. and then a worse problem, how do I know which picture of "B1" is which when I go to delete the one I don't want?
Mike

What's most likely is that the B1 volume got reformatted/resized/whatever and appears to QRecall as two different volumes. You can confirm this by looking at the timeline (or info sidebar) and see that all of the captures of the first B1 occur before the second B1.

If you want to keep all of this history, simply select both B1 icons and choose Archive > Combine Items. This command takes two volumes, or two owners, that are actually the same volume/owner and stitches them together to form a single item with one time lime.

Alternatively, if you're not interested in that much history, find the older B1 (again, use the info sidebar) and delete it (Archive > Delete Item).