Disk rotation with QRecall?

Is there an easy way to do disk rotation with QRecall? With Time Machine, you just point TM at a new disk. Can I just tell QRecall to use a new disk for the same backups I've been doing, so that I can move the old disk to, e.g., offsite storage? Or do I have to set up everything from scratch?

I can suggest a few ways of doing this.

The manual method, equivalent to pointing Time Machine at a new drive, is to do that same with QRecall.

- Disconnect the old drive, plug in the new one
- Create a new archive (or copy the one from the old drive)
- Open any action that used the old archive and select the new archive
- Save the action

If you rotate backup drives on a regular basis you could automate this to some degree by creating two sets of actions, one that uses archive A and an identical set that uses archive B. In each action, add an Ignore If No Archive condition.

As long as the drive with archive A is plugged in and mounted, the A set of actions will run. As long as the drive with archive B is mounted, the B set of actions will run.

A slight variation on the second approach is to create a set of actions that run when a particular volume is mounted using the Archive Volume Connects event schedule. Again, create two sets of actions for archive A and archive B. Now, whenever you connect the volume that contains archive A, the A set of actions runs immediately. When you connect the volume containing archive B, then B set of actions start.

James Bucanek wrote:If you rotate backup drives on a regular basis you could automate this to some degree by creating two sets of actions, one that uses archive A and an identical set that uses archive B. In each action, add an Ignore If No Archive condition.

As long as the drive with archive A is plugged in and mounted, the A set of actions will run. As long as the drive with archive B is mounted, the B set of actions will run.

This is exactly what I do, and it works quite well. I generally swap the two drives every Friday, but if I forget, the actions continue to run on schedule, backing up to whichever backup drive happens to be mounted.

Compare that to Retrospect, where, if the expected drive isn't there, the backup script halts and does nothing until you connect the drive it wants.