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A much more usable solution would be to simply get the actions to wrap up faster.
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Frederic Thomas wrote:In the same vein, a "skip today" and "skip forever" button pair in the activity would be nice. If you see QRecall starting to backup a huge file you forgot to skip, you can have it done from there. The "just now" option is useful for laptops. Yes you want the backup to complete before leaving but you can tolerate that the latest Leopard preview disk of 6+ GB is not backed up today cos you're in a hurry and you can always download it later.
That's an interesting suggestion. That would be some logical functionality to add to the status window if it showed pending actions.
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Frederic Thomas wrote:To be clear, I am specifically interested in the backup server mode of Retrospect. Please don't take hints from their user interface
The inspiration for QRecall was Retrospect's UI Seriously, I once overwrote a file and decided that would be easier to retype it than try to restore it using Retrospect. That was the day I decided that there had to be a better way.
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Frederic Thomas wrote:Every time something is cancelled by clicking in the little box of the activity window, it takes ages to actually do it. The compact stage actually does not seem to be cancelable at all.
The only action that can't be canceled is a Merge. That's because the merge is deleting the directory structure of several layers and replacing it with a new layer. It's sort of an all or nothing proposition. The Compact action is actually the most easily canceled action, with this caveat: If the compact has recovered a lot of space, that space must be overwritten by zeros to maintain the integrity of the archive. If, when you click on the cancel button the status changed to "Erasing free space", then the action has received the cancel request and is cleaning up. If it doesn't, then that's a bug I'd like to know about.
Initially the box seems to accept clicks, but now it does not anymore and it's been running for 4:15...
Once a cancel request has been accepted, the button disables itself. This indicates that the cancel request was received and reflects that fact that you can't cancel an action that has already been canceled. How much space has the compact recovered and how fast is the drive? If your backup archive is on a USB port or network volume, things that take seconds to complete on a local drive might take minutes.
Now having this choice worries me because it means a HW failure would lead to a destroyed archive. The system should be resilient to that sort of abrupt failures.
QRecall archives are extremely resilient and specifically designed to avoid data loss even in the case of power failure or kernel panics. But one of the cornerstones of this design is that every single bit of an archive file is accounted for and is internally consisitent, which is why the compact must erase any "garbage" left over before it can close the archive. If the QRecall action/process crashes or is interrupted for any reason, the repair command will be able to recover all of the successfully written data. QRecall processes also interpret BSD kill signals as a cancel requests, so it's safe to shut down your system without first stopping a QRecall action. As the system shuts down, each running QRecall process will be cleanly canceled, finish up its work, and properly close its archive.
So why can't it do that by itself when I click the cancel button?
A QRecall archive that has not been properly closed cannot be used again until you perform a repair. Repairing an archive is an exacting and time consuming process, which is best avoided.
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Ah, yes. (I mentally had the Used and Avail numbers from df swapped in my head). This could simply be a problem with the base station's disk sharing. You can Verify the archive to ensure that it's sound. You might also make sure you that you've applied the latest firmware upgrade. This has solved several problems for QRecall users with the new Airport Extreme base stations. An interesting test would be to unmount the drive from the base station and plug it directly into your Mac then see what df, Disk Utility, et. al. says about it.
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I have 2 computers and I am using the same key and the same file for both.
I forgot to mention, you should really use two identity keys if you are capturing two different systems to the same archive. The files from each computer will belong to their respective owner (in the Owners & Volumes drawer) where there's no possibility of confusing the two. Yet they will both share the same data store, with the all space saving advantages.
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From your logs, it appears that you captured your home folder to the archive IncyBack. QRecall captured (read) 41.7 GB worth of files. Of this, 11.5 GB (28%) was duplicate, so the archive only grew by about 30.1 GB. You can see these numbers by increasing the detail level in the log viewer by one and expanding the line that says "Captured 33360 items, 41.7 GB (28% duplicate)". The details of that message will list exactly how much data was read, how much was duplicate (already in the archive), how much new data was written to the archive, and other miscellaneous details. The "problems" encountered during the capture are minor, and I intend to remove them from the log in future versions. They occur when QRecall reads a folder to determine what files to capture, then comes back a few moments later to actually capture them. If another process has deleted or renamed the file in the intervening time, QRecall logs a "File not found" error.
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I have plans to eventually extent both filtering and capture item selection to include a vast array of rules, probably based on Spotlight queries.
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Frederic Thomas wrote:I think the Mac world could do with an alternative to the moribund Retrospect. There's a million of solutions to backup stuff to a local HD, but very few solutions to replicate what can be done with Retrospect backup server: network backup every N hours (or ASAP) of potentially mobile mac (and windows) clients.
Have no fear; I have Retrospect squarely in my sights.
IMHO QRecall is very close to that goal (except for Windows). What's missing is probably better collaboration between instances and "home/server" detection (if the backup volume is on an airport extreme, it works).
QRecall will eventually grow to include direct network support, so that captures and recalls can be performed remotely -- even over the Internet. (Please be patient; there's a lot of work to do between now and then.) QRecall's duplicate data detection is (roughly) based on the principles of rsync -- although on a much grander scale. I'm sure you can see the potential for extremely efficient network-based captures. Far faster and more efficient than Retrospect or similar utilities.
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Frederic Thomas wrote:However it seems 2 QRecall instances cannot access the file simultaneously, is this correct?
Two actions can't modify an archive simultaneously, but QRecall is fully aware when other actions/computers/processes are doing so and will patiently wait until the current action is finished. Go ahead a schedule your two computers to capture to the same archive. If one doesn't finish before the other is ready to start, it will wait its turn. I capture five systems to a single archive and all of them start nightly at 2:00 AM. They capture one at a time until all five are done.
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Frederic Thomas wrote:Again, I understand the logic. I am suggesting the UI is fixed as staring at a beach ball for 1 minute and 20 second feels very long (progress bar?), especially since the size of the full disk is known...
I would have loved to have used a progress bar, but it's a catch-22. You have to read all of the folders to determine how many folders you have to read.... But I agree that it's the one point that sort of "breaks the flow" of the assistant. I'll look into ways of handling it more efficiently.
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How can I find it back in the middle of 555 other windows?
For that, I find exposé particularly handy. You can always launch QRecall and choose Window > Activity Monitor > QRecall Activity to force the activity window to the front. Also note that QRecall supports Growl.
Also, this little window only tells me what qRecall is doing. It would nice if it was telling me as well what qRecall will do when (i.e. "Currently: idle Next task: merge in 23:45 hours").
That's an excellent suggestion. I'll put that on the to-do list.
It would also be nice to be able to launch the program from the window?
I've considered having a persistent Open Log button in the activity window, which would have the side effect of launching the application.
(Note I have QRecallMonitor and QRecallScheduler in my process list)
FYI: QRecallMonitor is a tiny background application that manages the activity window. QRecallScheduler is a daemon that schedules actions to run.
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Frederic Thomas wrote:OK, maybe I was not very clear. I am not saying it does not calculate fast enough. I am saying it would be best if it was not calculating at that point in time. Your point is that it needs the calculation to provide "intelligent suggestions". But how good will be these suggestions if any of the accounted for sizes (data and backup sizes) do significantly change?
The assistant performs a number of sanity checks, like making sure you don't start off by trying to capture three times more data than the size of the volume the archive is on. It also make quesstimates about how much data, and how long, you can reasonably expect the archive to hold. All of those checks and suggestions require knowing approximately how much data you're trying to capture. I agree that things can change, and the various actions created by the capture assistant can deal with those based on your preferences. But I think it's important that you be presented with some reasonable estimate of what can, or can't, accomplish before you begin. While the estimation process might be slow, a failed multi-GB capture is even slower.
Don't get me wrong: I am all for a new good Mac backup solution. And what I have seen so far with qRecall is great. But from a user interface perspective however, I don't think having to wait for 30 minutes to be able to finish a wizard is good. If it takes that long, it should be done in the background, or something...
Yikes, that's way too slow. I think I've got a fair number of files in my home folder (~200,000) and it take less than a minute to estimate my home folder size. If it's taking more than 5 minutes, then something is amiss.
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The capture assistant is calculating the size of your home folder about as fast as it can. If you went to the Finder, selected your home folder, and choose Get Info, it would take about as long. Unfortunately, there's no magic way of quickly determining the total size of a folder without reading every folder it contains and totalling the contents. The capture assistant needs this information in order to make intellegent suggestions.
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Jan Sass wrote:Ok, created a new archive with 44b yesterday, pressed 'run' in actions-pane today, and got 'connection with command process closed' after about 5 min. and 17 files backup. backup stoped after some more minutes, stating: corrupted, repair or reindex? plus: i have backup up only 1 drive, not multiple as in the past. so, my 44b is broken again, backup data lost.
Your QRecall Helper process is crashing. Please send me your log files again along with the crash log at ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/QRecallHelper.crash.log and we'll try to figure out what's going wrong. If you want, we can take this to private e-mail. You can send me the files directly at james@qrecall.com.
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