I?ve been using QRecall for about six years as my front-line backup utility for several MacBook Pros and iMacs. Perhaps that?s long enough that a few highlights of my experience with QRecall could be a useful post on this Forum.

I just replaced an early-2011 MacBook Pro with a 2017 version. I used QRecall to restore the 2011's newly upgraded 10.13.5 boot volume to the 2017 machine's boot volume.  I've NEVER had such an upgrade go flawlessly the way this one did using QRecall. Settings, preferences, and everything else appear to be perfectly mirrored now on the new machine (except for those that didn't exist on the old one). And QRecall?s combine command worked perfectly to stitch together the two resulting volumes in each archive so that I now have an uninterrupted backup history for that new 2017 computer going back several years.

All I did after QRecall restored everything was do a reinstall of the macOS from the recovery partition to come as close as I could to a clean macOS install without actually doing one. This is the first time I?ve not done an actual clean install of the OS and all the apps for a machine upgrade. This QRecall restore to the new machine not only was faster and completely hassle-free, but gave me a glitch-free working system with fully set preferences for the macOS and all the apps as soon as the QRecall restore was done.

Day-to-day operation of QRecall is similarly impressive. I?ve consistently found it to be the most reliable, flexible, easy-to-use, and powerful backup tool of the many I?ve used and discarded over the last 30 years. I?ve never encountered a single data error in anything I?ve restored from a QRecall backup archive.

One of our Macs is used for tight-deadline and complex technical editing for an international finance, banking, and business-development organization. QRecall?s elegant, flexible, and powerful backup-action definitions allow me to set up that machine so that it does a capture of user-defined active files every five minutes, and QRecall?s deduplication capability makes that frequent backup operation both efficient and fast, capturing only changed data, not entire files. The editor doing that complex and time-sensitive work can never lose more than five minutes of work (or less if I set it differently) under even a complete system and/or hardware crash. Even in a combined total crash of the OS and hardware, the speed, comprehensiveness, and simplicity of QRecall?s restore features means she can be back at work on another Mac right where she left off in less than 10 minutes with all her work immediately being backed up again every 5 minutes.

And then QRecall also does a user-scheduled and user-defined system backup (and a deep verification of each archive?s integrity) every night.

QRecall has been my 1st-line backup utility ever since I discovered it six years ago because of its steady reliability, the data integrity of backed-up files, its impressive and easy-to-use customization capabilities, and the equally steady and top-shelf quality of QRecall's tech support and response times when I encounter problems or things I don't understand.

My only negative experience with QRecall turned out not to be negative at all. In the early going, I got repeated capture errors, verification failures, and other such things that necessitated frequent repair of the QRecall archives and lots of calls to tech support. But as I worked through those with James, what I found was that QRecall?s refusal to permit data errors and other anomalies in the backup archives and/or processes was helping isolate and correct problems with other software, file sharing issues, and even power issues. Once those problems were resolved, QRecall stopped reporting failures, stopped needing repairs, and began functioning with the reliability described earlier in this post.

My thanks to James for all he does?both visibly and behind the scenes?to give QRecall users such a reliable, flexible, efficient, easy-to-use, highly customizable, and powerful tool, all combined with reliably error-free backups and the best tech support I've ever experienced for any software in the 30 years I?ve been using Macintosh computers.

James,

I suspected that trivial wasn't a good word to describe what I'm looking for. I'll experiment with your suggestion, but I also don't hold out much hope given the way I suspect Microsoft has built this. I'll let you know either way.

Meanwhile I'll look forward to 2.1 as the next possibility (I understand no guarantees it will enable what I'm looking for either), and for now I'll just be happy to keep doing what I've been doing to capture that database. Thanks for considering the question and letting me know your thoughts.

James,

Been looking forward to using the new QRecall version 2.0 event schedules to run an Action upon quitting an application. But so far I haven't been able to do what I hoped with it. Here's the problem:

Applications in the Microsoft Office 2008 suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage) all require that a shared database be open whenever one or more of the applications in that suite is/are running. So quitting one application in that suite leaves the database open if another application in the suite is still running (a frequent occurrence).

The problem, at least as I understand it, is that the database in question cannot be captured accurately while it's open?and I need its capture to be accurate. Since I often run two or more of those four Office applications at the same time, setting QRecall to capture that database when I quit any one of those four means the database gets captured while it's open because another member of the MS Office suite is still using it.

If I set the QRecall event schedule to capture that database when I quit one of those MS applications, the capture event occurs just as it should (regardless of the open/closed condition of the database). But as noted above that doesn't meet my need. If I'm to use this new feature of QRecall 2.0, it seems that what I need as this event-trigger is something that quits only when ALL the Microsoft applications in that Office suite have finally quit. Of course, there's no way to predict which one will be the last to close; hence my interest in finding some way to have QRecall capture that database only when the last of member of that suite has finally quit, no matter which of them that may be from time to time.

There is an application called Microsoft Database Daemon that as far as I can tell runs only when one or more of the applications in that suite is open and running. So in planning my upgrade to QRecall 2.0, I had hoped that I could define the automatic quit of the Microsoft Database Daemon as the trigger-event for capturing that database. But I can't get that to work?perhaps because its Quit action is software controlled and doesn't quit the way a traditional application would.

Is there a way to get that to work? Or is there another/better way to get QRecall 2.0 to capture that database automatically only when the last of those four (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage) has finally quit (and therefore they are ALL finally no longer running)?

I have a work-around for this that I've been using for years, so it is not a critical issue; but if there's a cleaner solution to this, I'd prefer to drop my work-around and just have QRecall 2.0 capture that database automatically whenever I quit whichever of those four happens to be the last one quit.

Thanks for listening?and for the best and most flexible back-up software for my purposes I've ever encountered over the last 20 years.

How about a single short sentence at the top of the list of repair options? Something like this:

"Deselecting a selected repair option may make other repair options available."

1. Is it possible to give users the ability to rename Capture Actions? I?m setting up some Capture Actions that grab more than one folder, but the QR-generated names of the Capture Actions are rather meaningless?things like ?Capture 2 items?? or ?Capture 3 items?? etc. If I could give those Actions my own less-generic names, it would be less confusing for others?and for myself.

2. May I also second Norbert Karl's suggestion (May 2013) about allowing more flexibility in the delays imposed before a QR Action starts that is keyed to archive-volume connect? User-defined times of up to 30 minutes would be great (or additional built-in options up to about that length), and in my case would allow true automation of things that I now have to baby-sit every day to avoid conflicts and slowdowns. I can provide more details on why this is important to me, but it sounds like you've already got this idea in the works, so I'll not burden you with further explanation unless you request it.

QRecall is a wonderful tool. Thanks for making it available?and for your work in supporting us out here.

James,

Yes, that would also be very helpful at times. Thanks.

A few of my QR Actions are handled with automatic schedules, but several others can be managed properly only by running each such Action manually. And in that manual environment, it would really be helpful if the Actions window could show not only the next scheduled run, but also the last actual run date and run time of each listed Action routine. Can that be done?

Thanks for some great software. I really like what I'm seeing so far. Ken