Either I'm misunderstanding the purpose of the "Ignore if no archive" condition, or else it's broken. When I add that condition to an action, the action stops working, even though the archive drive is mounted and the archive is available. It doesn't matter whether the archive is open or not. I checked the log file to see what was going on, but there's no indication (even at the max detail setting) that the action even attempted to run. It doesn't run either manually or scheduled.

On the other hand, if I change the condition to "Hold while no archive", it performs exactly as I expected.

What I would like to do is have rotating backups between two or more external hard drives. One would be mounted at all times, and the others would be offsite. I'd have a set of scripts which were duplicates except that each one referred to an archive on a different backup drive. Each would be scheduled every day, with an "Ignore if no archive" condition. I'm assuming this should ensure that an archive is performed every day, regardless of which hard drive happened to be mounted.

If it works, it beats the heck out of Retrospect. In Retro, I can define two scripts with alternating weekly schedules, but if no one is there to swap drives on time, then the backup just hangs. Worse, one of the dialog actions is to mark the drive as lost, which is apparently easy to do, because our office manager has done it several times when holidays caused an exception to our normal schedule. Once Retro thinks a drive is lost, it's very difficult to get it to save any more backups to it.

Bruce Giles wrote:Either I'm misunderstanding the purpose of the "Ignore if no archive" condition, or else it's broken.

It's broken. It probably broke on the previous release, which involved significant changes to the scheduler. It will be fixed on the next release.

Interim release 1.0.0b45 corrects this problem.

Download and install the update by choosing QRecall > Check for updates....