It sounds like you had the Show Deleted Items option enabled in the View menu. With this option set, any recall action will recall not just the most recent items, by all previously deleted items from earlier layers.

Hi James, yes, that is correct, I did have show hidden items turned on, I turned it on when i started using QRecall to see what was happening (I'm fairly inquisitive) and hadn't turned it off again.
So for future readers, if I had not had Show Deleted Items turned on, the restore would only have brought back current items at the time of the latest layer and not everything. Well I won't do that again

It also raises the question of the Show Invisible Items menu item, does that behave in the same way? I would hope not

Thanks again James.

Gavin

I have just had to restore my system after it locked and wouldn't reboot. I tried doing it several ways over the last couple of days. My main archive had 310 layers in it and after I restored from the most recent layer, I discovered that items and applications that had previously been deleted had also been restored, which was not quite what I wanted. I also discovered that the restore process was much faster if I erased the target drive (in the order of twice as fast)(170 GB). What I eventually ended up doing was to copy the archive to another location and merged all the layers in that copy down to one and restore from there.
That gave me what I wanted, I couldn't find this sort of info in the help system, James would it be worth putting some more info on your "Restoring OS X" page?
Thanks
Gavin