I seem to be running an interminable backup. I'm backing up my macbook pro drive with about 500g on it. yesterday the backup captured 904 items, 403.7 MB (70% duplicate), and took 8 minutes. Very little changed since then. Today's backup has been running for 8 hours and has captured 52gb (99% duplicate), 68,000 items. Activity monitor is showing a steady stream of received data at between 2 and 4 mb/sec. Is qrecall reading the entire archive? If so, why, and is it normal? I don't think I've seen this before.

I'm running this backup over a wifi network, right now showing a transmit rate of 52. If qrecall does need to read the entire archive I'd probably be better off stopping this backup and rerunning it with the drive directly connected to the MBP. If I do that, will the archive keep the material already backed up, or will it purge the uncompleted backup?

Ralph

Ralph Strauch wrote:Is qrecall reading the entire archive? If so, why, and is it normal?

It sounds like it's recapturing all of the items on your drive. Why, I can't say (definitively). If that's what it is doing, then capturing to a drive directly connected to your MacBook is likely to be much faster.

There are a number of reasons why QRecall will rescan all of the items on a drive, or decide to recapture items.

QRecall periodically rescans all of the files on your volume looking for changes. This usually happens about once every 14 days. If a layer is damaged or incomplete, that will also force it rescan all of the items.

If you've reformatted or resized a volume, that may cause it appear as a new volume, which QRecall will dutifully recapture—in its entirety.

The short answer is (I'm hoping) that QRecall is just doing its job, re-capturing items to ensure that they're all backed up.

I stopped the interminable backup and switched the drive to connect directly with the MBP. From there, the backup captured 101696 items, 1.69 GB (94% duplicate), and took 45 minutes. It did not seem to be reading the whole drive this time, so whatever was causing it earlier didn't transfer to the direct mount. The interminable backup did not create a new volume, but just became part of the volume that was already there.

In any case, everything seems back to normal now.

Ralph

Ralph Strauch wrote:It did not seem to be reading the whole drive this time, so whatever was causing it earlier didn't transfer to the direct mount.

It's also possible that the previous capture decided to resize one of the index files. This can be a very I/O intensive and time consuming process (especially over a wireless link). Index files in the archive are periodically resized/rebuilt for efficiency. This will happen a dozen or so times over the lifetime of an archive.