I made the jump and started testing QRecall 2 (b13).

While there are many nice things to discover, I encountered quite a few issues that I will report later. For the moment my biggest concern is how to deal with databases and big but unimportant data on my disks. While it sounded like QR2 would have some solutions, it seems they are not enough in my case. But maybe I overlooked something. So no complains but the question: How would you advice to deal with the following situations in QR2:

1) Excluding the data hogs
I do audio and film productions which generate a lot (>100GB) of intermediate data, proxy files, analysis data, caches etc. that do not belong in a backup. Unfortunately they are scattered all over the disks and with every new project new folders would have to be excluded. So the manual route seems no work around.

2) Taming the databases
Many of my applications work with database. Preventing backups while any of those are running would effectively stop all backups. And again there are too many files involved to exclude all of them from the hourly backup and create a manual action to cover them before shutdown.

A solution for both issues would be simple filters on file/folder names (exclude/include *.dtBase2, peaks/*, analysis/* export/* ect). Any other suggestions?

I hope there will be a solution in RQ2, cause otherwise QR is (and has been for years) exactly what I need (and the alternatives are not convincing either).
Thanks,
Johannes

Johannes wrote:A solution for both issues would be simple filters on file/folder names (exclude/include *.dtBase2, peaks/*, analysis/* export/* ect).

Your wish is mine, too, as I made a similar request just a few days ago.

Any other suggestions?

Before that happens, QR2's command line tool "qrecall" might provide a workaround. The following line should work to exclude all "peaks/*" under the /project_folder tree from QR2 backup:

find /project_folder -type d -name "peaks" -print0 | xargs -0 qrecall captureprefs exclude

Similarly, the following line should get "*.dtBase2" excluded:

find /project_folder -type f -name "*.dtBase2" -print0 | xargs -0 qrecall captureprefs exclude

Put them in a bash script and run them as often as necessary. You can use Hazel, Keyboard Maestro or the like to automate the task. Even the good old crontab can do the job.

Thank you for the work around code lines. I was thinking in that direction myself. Your examples saved me half an hour digging into man pages and pipe procedures. Seems that the command line tool will provide means to deal with my problem. But I hope there will be a more reliable solution (it's easy to forget to run the exclude script when your head is in creative mood when starting new projects).

Johannes