Hallo,

I am desperately trying to find a solution for the following scenario:

I have a MacOS Sierra Fusion Drive (HHD+SSD) running and want to upgrade to High Sierra (clean install) but without a Fusion Drive setuo.

So I want to backup the Sierra Fusion Drive to an external normal spinning Harddrive (maybe cloning?) with Qrecall. Then I want to make
a clean install of High Sierra on my MacMini, Install and run QRecall on that High Sierra System and restore a selection of my important
Data (not all Data, no full restore) from the former QRecall Sierra Fusion Drive backup.

Is this possible with QRecall?

Thanks a lot for your answer in advance

Nico

Nico,

QRecall can certainly help you. Although, if I'm being completely honest, you don't need QRecall to accomplish this.

Here's how I'd do it using QRecall:

(1) Format and install Sierra on an external drive.
(2) Download and install QRecall
(3) Using the capture assistant to create an archive on the external drive and capture your entire startup volume. (Have a snack while QRecall does its thing.)
(4) Boot from the external drive
(5) Use Disk Utility or whatever you need to replace/erase/reformat your internal drive.
(6) Download and use the High Sierra installer to install a fresh OS your empty internal drive.
(7) Download and install QRecall again (or just drag the copy of QRecall from the external drive on to the internal one).
(8) Open QRecall and open the archive on your external drive.
(9) Selectively recall the items you want. You can do this simply by dragging an item from the archive into Finder to re-install or replace the items on your new system, exactly as you would using the Finder.
(10) Enjoy

Notes:

- In step 9, QRecall's "Restore" command won't work because your internal volume is brand new and is no longer the source of the items in the archive.

- Make sure that the "short" (UNIX) name of your new account(s) matches your current account(s). If you do that, Qrecall will automatically fix up any ownership issues when you recall the items so they continue to belong to the same users (something a clone or straight copy utility won't do).

If you want to continue using QRecall, you're already done 90% of the work of setting up an bootable external volume for performing catastrophic recoveries. All you'd need to do now is use the capture assistant to set up regular capture strategy of your new startup volume to the existing archive on the external drive (and with QRecall's data de-duplicating, it won't even get any bigger). And then you'll probably want to upgrade the external drive so it's running High Sierra too.

Let us know if you have additional questions or run in to any problems.

Hi James,

thanks a lot for the quick reply! Started to do as you suggested but my backup didn´t start.
Activity message showing message: "idle". Nothing happens. I did the "Quit and Uninstall" cycle with
restarting the system...but nothing happens. My Archive size is 629 GB and something and the free
space on the backup drive ist 630.06 GB. Is this maybe the reason? If, it would be nice to have
an info, saying whats the reason for not starting in this case f.e. "disk space" or similar.
But maybe it is a differenr reason. Log shows only the installing and uninstalling axtivities.

Thank you very much for your help in advance

Nico

Nico,

QRecall logs almost every reason it does or does not do something, but sometimes it's considered "minutia" so you might need to slide the Details level in the log window further to the right.

If you don't thing somethings working, start by sending a diagnostic report. Open QRecall and choose Help > Send Report from the menu.

That will collect your recent log activity (a lot of which you don't normally see), crash reports, and configuration information that will hep us figure out what's going on.

Hi James,

Updating to Version 2.1.8 did it! It´s just updating in the background. I am very impressed by the speed!
And by your support as well

Thanks a lot.

Best from Europe

Nico