Specific Incremental backup

Hi!

I already use backup softwares, Retrospect, SuperDuper, CCC, Tri-Backup 5, but none permits to «monitor» a particular file with the what i may call «incremental save backup» function.

In the old days I was using «Flashback» in MacOS 9 - yes 9 -to do incremental backup of the documents I was working on.

Every time I was performing a «save» function on a document or a file, a back-up - with an incremental suffix - of the previous saved file was done.

So I was able to keep and recall, at anytime, any older saved files of a project.

This application died with MacOS 9.

In Mac OSX, a new application of the same kind was introduced. It was called Versomatic. It was performing about the same function, meaning : keeping a copy of all the previous saved files for a single document.

I liked it very much but the developers killed it with the introduction of Time Machine.

Is there a way with QRecall to perform such function?

Or could it be implemented in the future?

You may think: «Who needs that kind of backup strategy?»

The short answer is that as a music composer - and a writer in my french native language - it saved my butt a few times in the past.

Best Regards

Michel Amyot

Michel Amyot wrote:Is there a way with QRecall to perform such function?

QRecall is really designed to capture incremental changes of your file to an archive, not create more copies of your files.

Or could it be implemented in the future?

Currently planned for version 1.3 will be the ability to schedule an action to run when an item changes (this feature will require Leopard). You will then be able to create an action to capture your working project file or folder automatically every time it's modified.

If you need to recover an earlier version, select the document, right/control+click, and choose the Recall command (you can do that now).

An interim solution you can try now is to schedule an action to capture just your project folder at some reasonable interval. This is what I do with my QRecall project files. I have an archive just for the QRecall project, and an action recaptures the project folder every 20 minutes. Since QRecall only captures changes, most of the time the capture does nothing. I can recover any changed file going back a week with a 20 minute resolution.

You may think: «Who needs that kind of backup strategy?»

I don't have to ask.

James Bucanek wrote:I have an archive just for the QRecall project, and an action recaptures the project folder every 20 minutes.

I should clarify that you don't have to have a separate archive to implement this kind of capture strategy, but it can improve performance if you plan to run lots of small capture actions.

As a counter example, I also capture my entire home folder (/Users/james) hourly. This is done to the same archive I use to capture my entire startup volume every night.

The difference is just performance. The amount of time it takes to open, update, and close an archive is largely dependent on its size and complexity. By capturing my working QRecall documents to its own archive means the archive is never very large and captures are extremely quick (most captures finish within 15 seconds).

Capturing my home folder to my primary backup archive takes much longer (several minutes) even when very little has changed, because my primary backup archive is about a 100 times bigger than my project archive.