I'm evaluating QRecall for my backup strategy. So far (14 hours!) I am VERY impressed. The description of the underlying technology is compelling and the interface is pretty incredible.

That said, I'm really surprised there's no way to omit classes of files that don't need to be backed up. I'm a Scala/Java developer and so my drive is littered with *.class files that don't need to be backed up. The Scala compiler apparently does not set the "do not backup" flag on it's output. Setting it manually doesn't seem practical given these files could be many places on my disk.

This is related to the post by John C. Beatty on 13-Jul-16. He suggests a full regular expression for excluding files. That would be the best solution, but as an interim I'd be satisfied with being able to exclude "*.ext" where the user fills in the extension. Don't even need a UI to get started; I'd be happy to use the defaults command.

I'm hoping you can bump this higher on your to-do list.

Thanks!

Byron,

Thanks for your interest in QRecall.

The ability to filter files during a capture is an oft requested feature, and it's already pretty high on the "to do" list. It is, unfortunately, held up for a couple of practical reasons (there are other features higher on the "to do" list) and for technical reasons, but I anticipate this feature will appear in QRecall 2.2.

QRecall 2.0 does have the ability to exclude individual files and folders using capture preferences. These can be set in the Finder (using the Capture Preferences service) or from the command line. Using the command line tool, you can kind-of-sort-of-almost get the effect you're looking for by setting the "exclude" preference en masse.

For example, if you want to exclude all of your *.class files you could use something like this:

find ~/Development -type f -name "*.class" -print0 | xargs -0 qrecall captureprefs exclude

The limitation with the exclude preference is that it is attached to the file. If your compiler deletes a .class file and then creates a new one, the exclude preference gets discarded along with the original file.

For situations like that, a more persistent setting would be to exclude the contents of the folders containing those .class files, either surgically or doing something crass like this:

find ~/Development -type d -name "[Cc]lasses" -print0 | xargs -0 qrecall captureprefs exclude contents

Note the exclude contents variant; this tells QRecall to capture the folder (and its metadata), but exclude all of the items contained in that folder.

I hope that helps, for now. Keep an eye on this space for a beta of the next version of QRecall, which may or many not have the features you're looking for.

Thanks for the quick reply. You can look forward to my registration of QRecall and I'll look forward to v 2.2.