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I let my backup drive get 99% full without having done a compact in a while. I started a compact on my system drive archive. My system drive is a 500MB SSD and the archive was occupying about 1.3 TB. It ran for 50 hours without finishing. I figured it might be slow due to low space on the drive, so I stopped it, cleaned up about 300 MB of space, then restarted the compact. (At the time I stopped it, the archive was still about the same size.) It finished literally 5 minutes later, having reduced the archive to 700 MB. Does this slow behavior, followed by rapid finish once there was space, sound like something you would expect? Thanks, Mike
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During a verify of one of my archives, it said that it failed due to a damaged or incomplete archive. I then repaired it, which succeeded. However, subsequent attempts at Verify still fail with the same message. Let me know what data you need and where to send it. Mike
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Thanks, that sounds like a perfect application... my laptop can sleep as much as possible, but wake for actions.
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What I don't understand is what it means to schedule a "wake" action? Is that something registered with the operating system that will be monitored even while the laptop is asleep, and capable of waking it from sleep? Or does QRecall have no ability to wake a sleeping laptop, rather only the ability to prevent it from sleeping? Mike
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Thanks for the thorough response! One question: can QRecall wake the laptop from sleep? I mean, if the laptop went to sleep long before the scheduled action. Or will it miss actions that should have happened when it was sleeping?
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I'm interested in minimizing power usage of my MacBook. It's usually plugged into power and sitting on my desk with an external monitor. I'd like it to sleep after being idle for a short time, any time of day or night that it's idle. But I'd also like it to wake for QRecall actions, any time of day or night. I'm having trouble understanding Mac automatic sleep (I have High Sierra). I see that I can set the "power savings" settings to turn off the displays after a fixed time, say five minutes. I don't see anywhere I can tell it to sleep after a fixed idle time. There is a button that says "enable power nap"... is that the way you tell a Mac to put itself to sleep? Second, I'd like QRecall to wake it. This seems to work (I've put "wake" as the action to take before QRecall actions). If I put the MacBook to sleep manually, it will wake up a few minutes before the schedule QRecall action. I'd like it to go to sleep afterward, but I'm hesitant to use that as a setting in my actions. I don't really want to force it to sleep, because I might be doing something else or running some other software. I'd really like to use the OS to sense idle time and put it back to sleep (or "power nap" if that's what it does). So, can you explain how to get a Mac to automatically sleep and whether QRecall actions will always wake it (given that setting)? And what's the best way to handle trying to put it back to sleep. Thanks, Mike
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I'd like to try a new capture strategy. Right now I have a set of about 30 actions, 15 per swapable backup drive (and they have 3 archives each, or 5 actions per archive). I want to try a whole different way of doing this. But I don't want to erase the current actions permanently. How can I save or backup the 30 actions as a complete set? By the way, the reason I want to change my strategy is that I want to power down my computer at night. Previously I was letting it run a lot of the actions at night. I also have learned through real use cases that I don't need my archives backed up as frequently. And finally, I've learned that I need it *not* to skip actions when the archive drive is not mounted, but to act on them as soon as the drive is connected, so I need to change that setting back to the default. I just don't want to lose the enormous work that it took to create those 30 original actions. Mike
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My QRecall status bar icon disappeared. Checking the log shows that an action is running at this very moment, which I don't want to stop ( a compact), but I'll try rebooting after that finishes. Any other ideas why it would disappear?
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I use two drives, call them A and B, with three QRecall archives on each one, call them A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, and B3, with corresponding archives using the same backup strategy on each drive. Some liquid spilled near drive A, and a little splashed on it. It seems to work, but I'm not comfortable trusting it any more and want to move the three archives A1, A2, and A3 to a third drive C before drive A fails due to possible corrosion. First problem is that the archives are 500 GB to 1 TB each and would take 4 to 8 hours to copy, each. That means, first, I'm concerned about possible corruption during the copy -- that's a lot of data to move with zero glitches. And second my computer is often with me while I'm away from home, and it's not easy to find enough time to make the copies, taking a minimum of three overnight copies and possibly more time if any of them fail, not to mention time for verifies. Is there a way to do the copy in smaller operations -- perhaps splitting the archives and copying and verifying individual pieces before reassembling? Second issue is that I want to make sure that QRecall is sill using the backup strategies for A1, A2, and A3 on the archives after moving to drive C. Is this just a matter of changing the archive path and name in each action? Mike
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Thanks, I did correct those "hold if no archive" to "ignore if no archive" . Should be cleaner now.
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Getting errors related to "identity key", some "lost process" too Note: I have six archives total : 3 archives on Disk 1 and 3 similar archives on Disk 2. I rotate Disk 1 and Disk 2 every week to an offsite storage area. This means that every week, a large number of actions are marked "waiting for archive" ... for instance while Disk 1 is offsite, every action for Disk 1 is marked "waiting for archive," and the next week same with Disk 2. I do not know if this "offsite rotation scheme" is causing problems. So far most of the actions do complete, so as far as I know I have most of my data and layers intact. But the numbert of errors over the past few days is enormous, so wanted to check. Report sent. Mike
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Wait.... sorry I got this wrong, it wasn't during a repair, it was during a verify. Also this may have been related to the possibility that the capture items were not available at the time... they were on an external drive. Obviously QRecall should probably not lose the connection to the process, it should just hold on the verify or report the specific situation (i.e. "capture items not present"). So I'll go ahead and report it.... butg I'm not going to worry about it too much, as I think all of my archives currently do not need repair, and I'm going to try to rerun the verify. Mike
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Got another "lost connection with process" while trying to repair an archive that says it needed repair. Report sent. Note this is 3rd "lost connection with process" I've gotten recently. I follow your instructions after each incident and things went well for a time.
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Thanks, James. I have one other question. This may be involved, and it's not high priority, so just give me a slice of info for now. I have sometimes wanted to delete large, old files from an archive. For instance I now have an archive that was capturing my system drive, call it "system.quanta", and I didn't realize it was capturing very large, constantly arriving new files in Downloads. So although my system drive has only 300 GB of stuff on it currently, this archive grew to 1.4 TB. I tried merging some of the old layers, and got it down to 1.2 TB. I don't merge any more layers for fear of losing history I might need for important files. So is there a command line tool that can delete individual files or groups of files according to a condition? For instance, what if I deleted everything in Downloads that was "older than X" or "larger file size than Y"? If this is possible, this may come in handy in the future, because I download a ton of large, always-changing, always-new files, and try as I might to have a system to keep them out of the archive, sometimes I can't follow an exact procedure and then end up in the archive. It won't do any harm in the short term, but the ability to prune as necessary would be great. Mike
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Here are my requirements: - back up system drive, and keep data for a couple of weeks at most. this backup would have the purpose of restoring my whole drive in the event of main drive failure. by keeping layers going back a week or two, I also have the option of restoring to an earlier time (maybe desirable if there was something deeply screwed up in the system configuration) --- The directories included in this archive would be everything on the system drive. - back up important user documents that change frequently, especially those are part of projects which can benefit from access to old layers. this would benefit from a rolling merge strategy that keeps layers going back quite a long time. --- The directories included would be everything in my home tree with the *exclusion* of Downloads. It would be nice to achieve these requirements with one archive, in order to avoid overlapping backups of data in the User tree. However, with the combination of different merge strategies, and the fact that Downloads is excluded from one but not the other, I'm pretty sure this is going to require two archives. Is that correct? James, as an aside, regarding the problem I reported, I am not trying to accomplish that task any more, and rather am experimenting with a new backup drive and setting up some backup along the lines I describe above. So there is no rush. If you discover something deeply broken, however, let me know.
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