I've got a really large archive (500G+) that I'm trying to open to restore a file from, and when I open it in QRecall the app just hangs. I assume it's crunching away at something but there's no UI, no window, and no feedback telling me as such.

Could there be some kind of dialogue window added so it's obvious what QRecall is actually doing?

Also, I don't know how long it should take for QRecall to open an archive this size, but it's been sitting there for 20 minutes now with no sign of activity.

To be honest, I tried to but didn't fully understand what the differences were between merge and rolling merge and what exactly they did, so I avoided creating an action using one of those to be completely safe. Merging gives the impression that stuff might be thrown away, and I didn't want to mess with something I didn't understand. (I know I should have RTFM.)

I don't currently have access to that archive at the moment, so I can't do speed tests, but once I do I'll give that (and running a merge) a try to see what happens.

Thanks for the speedy reply.

It's definitely going over the wire - I have airport turned off on my machine and as well just did a test transfer with a large file (a 20G VM image) which transferred a LOT faster.

I checked out that Apple suport doc. As far I as can see, it deals with repairing Time Machine sparseimages and not the actual disk itself - it's not possible to drag the entire TC volume itself into the Disk Utility window.

If it was easier to pull the hard drive out of the TC itself, I'd try that, but the fact that I can get pretty decent transfer speeds using other files make me wonder exactly where the issue lies.

Neil

Thanks for the thorough reply! Just another reason why Qrecall is great (for the most part. ). It's great to hear that these issues are being thought about and addressed!

Regarding the slow restore times - I'm not exactly sure why they're so slow, but I can provide at least a little context to my setup that might help.

- Mac OS X 10.6.7
- 2010 MBP backing up via gigabit ethernet to a Time Capsule
- Current archive is appr. 510G

I've been having problems (related?) with backups getting interrupted for some reason - the Time Capsule keeps getting unmounted from my system and I'm still trying to track down why. But to give you an idea of the slowness Im seeing, I'm currently trying to repair that archive and here's where it is after 25 hours:



I think it actually might be stuck here as I haven't seen any of the numbers go up in over an hour. I know this is a huge archive, but is that normal?

Neil

Update: Yup, it's stuck - it hasn't changed in the entire time since I posted earlier. Any suggestions?

I've been using Qrecall now for a while and feel like I can finally offer some kind of informed opinion on the UI. I totally recognize that the problem this UI is trying to solve is exceedingly difficult, but I will be blunt: I recognize the goal is to create a "Time Machine Pro", but the user experience and flow within the UI still exceedingly complex and, especially in the case of the archive view, cluttered with too much, well, infojunk.

An example - see this screenshot of my archive. I know you can turn this off, but what exactly does this communicate?

All of those lines are meaningless, at least to the untrained eye. I see the idea behind what they're supposed to signify, but at this scale with these many connections, they doesn't actually add anything meaningful to the experience - it's infojunk.

Finding a file within the archive is similarly overcomplex: the search field seems to imply I can search my archive, but searches there do nothing. I think the problem is either my archive is too big, or maybe I'm not constraining the time span for the search properly? It's not clear.

It's possible I completely misunderstand how the archive view is supposed to work, but I guess that's specifically my point - the use is opaque to the user. Constraining the time span of the view is also confusing, specifically because the "handles" that you drag to narrow down the time span are out of view. You have to scroll to find them, and if I didn't know they existed, I'd never find them.

Overall I'm happy with the mechanics of how Qurecall works - it's restored a lost Users folder and restored a full install perfectly, albeit very, very slowly -- the Users folder restore took 2 days, for example[!]. I can see how its backup approach is superior technically to Time Machine, but the UI is so dense and unclear it's hard to not want to switch back to Time Machine purely for efficiency's sake: backing up is a lot faster w/ Qrecall, but figuring out where a particular file is, and restoring files is so slow those benefits are a wash compared to Time Machine.

I hate criticizing a UI without offering some suggestions, and I'm happy to collate a list of stuff I've noticed. My basic suggestion is that the default UI should be optimized for the primary use case for each task.

- Chances are if you open an archive it's to find or restore files. This is difficult with the current UI
- If you need to constrain the time span, it shouldn't require physical motion (scrolling and dragging) - give me a date picker or something more effective
- Search should provide more feedback - when you perform a search it looks like nothing is happening - which from my tests can sometimes be true?
- The view when you have multiple backups in a single archive is confusing. In the screenshot above, it's not clear why I have two instances of my system, and the presence of "Unknown" is unnerving. Where did that come from? What does that mean?

These thoughts are still pretty scattered, but I wanted to at least get the gist of them out. I'm happy to spend a bit more time diagramming how I think the userflows should work but wanted to see what everyone's thoughts were.

I have airport turned off on my laptop, so that can't be it. I wonder if it's a Time Capsule bug / limitation. I just did some AJA speed tests on the drive, and the average write speed was 50+mb/s. Reading, however, was barely 10mb/s.

At any rate, after about 6 hours the restore operation finished (145G of data in total) and everything was exactly as it was. This is the first time I've tried restoring this much data and it's reassuring that QRecall did what it was supposed to.

Hey there -

The short of it is I had a third party's software set up to do a scheduled backup of my user folder, and using a pre-release version of that software caused the last backup to went awry -- the entire Users folder was deleted.

Luckily I had been religiously backing up my Users folder using QRecall to the drive in my Time Capsule. I launched QRecall and started the restore process. I think there was around 100G of data.

Four hours later, it's barely 1/2 done. My primary machine is connected to the Time Capsule via ethernet, so I assume it's at least a 100MB connection. It could be gigabyte ethernet, too - I'm not sure if that's the default protocol between the Time Capsule and a 2010 MBP.

Is this expected? If so, it seems like an issue - I've restore appr. this amount of data backed up to the same Time Capsule via Time Machine in under 2 hours.

Neil
P.S. This is with the latest QRecall beta.

I'll send a report related to this issue, but I thought I'd post here as well in case someone else has the same problem.

I backup to a Time Capsule and have two separate backup actions - one that does the entire boot volume (at 2am every day), and one that backs up my user folder (every hour).

All has worked fine until today, when I noticed that a number of folders and files were missing from my Sites folder. Going through the archive I managed to track down that the files disappeared between the user folder capture at 11:35pm and the full system capture at 2am on January 9th. I *definitely* did not delete those files, so I'm puzzled.

Besides the report I'm sending right after I post this, is there anything else I can do to track down what happened?

Hi there -

I have a Time Capsule that I'm using as a remote store for QRecall. Everything works great if that volume is mounted. I've set up a scheduled backup, however, that's supposed to run at 2am, with the "wake before" option selected.

For some reason I can't figure out, QRecall isn't mounting this remote volume, so when I return later, I see a bunch of actions "waiting for archive".

Any ideas where I can start troubleshooting this?