Empty backups

I've had several instances this week in which scheduled backups of my Users files only contained 2 or 3 items -- the Users folder itself and the home folders for users for whom files had changed since the last backup, but none of the files themselves. Running a subsequent backup would pick everything up. The problem first occurred on Sunday, running beta 57, then again yesterday and today, running beta 68. It's happened on both my computers, and on two different backup drives.

I'll send a report from this computer. The problematic backups are the following. If an additional report from the iMac would be useful, let me know.

Action 2012-02-12 15:11:06 ------- Capture to userbackupA.quanta
Action 2012-02-15 09:07:34 ------- Capture to userbackupA.quanta
Action 2012-02-16 08:21:40 ------- Capture to 2nd backup.quanta

Ralph

Ralph,

Update to 1.2.0(59), and take a look at the thread "Incremental Capture Issues...".

Thanks. That seems to have taken care of it. I also discovered something I hadn't known before -- that qrecall can back up to two different archives at the same time. I was leaving the house for the afternoon so I decided to start the recapture that beta 59 recommends on both archives, thinking it would do one first and then the other. Much to my surprise they both ran at the same time.

I'm still getting an error on the dev folder when I backup my full drive. I'd like to just exclude that from the backup, but don't see any way to exclude invisible folders. Is there an easy way to do that?

Ralph

Ralph Strauch wrote:I also discovered something I hadn't known before -- that qrecall can back up to two different archives at the same time.

The only thing you can't do is run two actions on the same archive at once.

The scheduler tries to do some basic load balancing and resource ordering, which you can adjust in QRecall's scheduler preferences ("Maximum concurrent actions" and "Maximum actions per volume"). If you set these to Automatic, QRecall will examine how much RAM and CPU cores you have, and pick an optimal number of actions to run concurrently.

I'm still getting an error on the dev folder when I backup my full drive. I'd like to just exclude that from the backup, but don't see any way to exclude invisible folders. Is there an easy way to do that?

Not really, and it won't help. The errors you're getting from /dev wouldn't even go away if you excluded it from the capture (you'd get a different error trying to exclude it).

I've filed a bug report with Apple.

I use a CP called AppTrap, which collects and throws out related files when I delete an application. It asks permission to do so first, so that it won't throw out prefs, etc., if the application is just upgrading itself. Unfortunately, when I was upgrading my 2nd computer to beta 59, I accidentally brushed the trackpad at the wrong time and ended up deleting the prefs. The most noticeable effect is that I've lost all my actions. Where does qrecall store actions, and is there an easy way for me to retrieve the necessary files from my backups and reinstall them? It's not a big deal if there's not; I can reconstruct them if necessary, but it just got me to wondering where the actions are stored.

Ralph

Ralph Strauch wrote:Where does qrecall store actions, and is there an easy way for me to retrieve the necessary files from my backups and reinstall them?

QRecall stores its actions in ~/Library/Preferences/QRecall/Actions.

Each action is stored in a separate document.

You may need to restart the QRecall application before it sees changes in this folder, and you may need to restart the scheduler before it sees any changes.

Alternatively, making a superfluous change (i.e. go to the QRecall actions window, duplicate an action, and then delete the duplicate) should signal all processes to re-read the contents of that folder.