It is barely 48 hours since I started experimenting with QRecall, and I bought a license after just 24 hours. I can only say thank you to James for developing such a wonderfully versatile piece of backup software. I have 3 Macs, one of which, a mac Mini, acts as a small server and to which is attached my Firewire backup drive. The other computers, a Mac Pro and my wife's macbook are connected to the server wirelessly.

We all know wireless connections are relatively slow, especially for running things like the merge and compact functions, but thanks to QRecall I have set these operations to be carried out from the server in the wee small hours when the other Macs are normally disconnected.

To keep the backup processes fairly slick on my Mac Pro, I perform a full backup of the boot volume once a day and 2 hourly backups of my user directory, but I have excluded three large folders from my user directory which only change infrequently, namely Music, Pictures and TV Programmes. These last three folders are backed up just once per day to their own archives. The effect of this is that my full volume archive is now more manageable and so connecting to it is relatively quick, important for the 2 hourly backups, it was taking about 5 minutes to connect when everything was in it.

On the Macbook, I have a similar strategy, but as my wife doesn't have much in the way of big files, her whole disk backup is quite small.

I can't see anything much wrong with this approach but if anyone has any suggestions I'd like to hear them.

Adrian

Adrian Chapman wrote:To keep the backup processes fairly slick on my Mac Pro, I perform a full backup of the boot volume once a day and 2 hourly backups of my user directory, but I have excluded three large folders from my user directory which only change infrequently, namely Music, Pictures and TV Programmes. These last three folders are backed up just once per day to their own archives. The effect of this is that my full volume archive is now more manageable and so connecting to it is relatively quick, important for the 2 hourly backups, it was taking about 5 minutes to connect when everything was in it.

Adrian,

Your approach is sound. I do have one question: Are you running the release version (1.1.4) or the current beta?

I ask because the beta has significant performance improvements, particularly in the amount of time it takes to add relatively small captures to an archive. If you're not using the beta, you might give it a try and see if you can include your music and video files with acceptable performance. (Remember that you can always delete those folders from your archive if you want to go back to your two archive arrangement.)

Regardless, what you have set up seems perfect. I might also suggest scheduling a verify action (again, on the MacMini), that runs about once a week. It's good to periodically check the integrity of the entire archive.

James

I have a copy of the beta and now that I have everything up and running smoothly with the latest release I'll certainly give the beta a try. Certainly, if the time taken to open a large archive is reduced it would be good to do away with the separate archives. Yes, I have set up regular verifies on all the archives on the Mac mini.

Thanks for your help.

I have now installed the beta on all 3 machines and I have done away with the separate archives for music etc. The speed of the beta has made these redundant, and simplified the management of the archives. At the moment I am doing rolling merges, compact and verify daily, but once I am happy that everything is stable I will ease back on the frequency of these actions.