I just download QRecall and set up an automated capture strategy to test it. My usage scenario is this:

I keep the archive on an external drive.

It is plugged in while I'm at home, which is 75% of the time.

I may have to unplug the external drive and leave home at short notice

So I would like it to capture data at least once per day, preferably two or three times per day. I also don't want to be stuck if it's working and I need to unhook the drive and go, so I want to be able to pause and resume the capture.

Is this possible?

Mike,

Thanks for checking out QRecall.

You can pause a running action, but that simply suspends the process. The archive files, and the volume that it's on, will remain open and connected.

recommended method

If a capture has started and you need to disconnect the archive volume or shutdown/restart, simply stop the capture by clicking the (X) button in the monitor. Unless your archive is huge, the capture will wind up and close the archive within a few seconds. (Or just shutdown/restart. The normal OS X shutdown will send a stop signal to the capture action, it's the same thing.)

All captures are incremental; the next capture will begin where the last one left off.

This will result in an "incomplete" layer in your archive. This is just a caution that the capture which created that layer didn't get a chance to finish, so when recalling from that layer be aware that not all items were captured. The next capture will fill in the blanks. (If you want to be extra neat, merge the incomplete layer with the one that follows to create a complete layer?as if the incomplete capture had never happened.)

Most long-running actions, notably capture and compact, are incremental. It's always safe to stop them when you need to and start them again later. There's even a shortcut in the monitor: right/control+click, or click-and-hold, the (X) stop button in the action's progress pane. The Stop and Reschedule command will stop the running action and immediately reschedule it to start again at a later time.

A few actions, like merge and combine, are not incremental and can't be interrupted. But these actions are typically quick and generally don't take more than a few minutes to finish.

the not recommended method

QRecall is designed to tolerate crashes, network failures, power outages, and dog/cat/ferret/foot induced volume disconnects. If you have a running capture, you could just pull the plug on your external volume and run. The next action will detect that the archive was left in an unfinished state and rewind it back to where it was, undoing all of the work of the interrupted action. This works about 99% of the time. In the rare conditions where QRecall can't automatically recover, you'll need to repair the archive before continuing.

While this isn't the recommended method for stopping a capture, it should underscore that you don't have to treat archives with kid gloves. The archive structure is carefully designed to survive all kinds of disasters and data loss, which the repair command will recover from.