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After thinking a bit more, I wonder if this was a ZFS filesystem error. Seems unlikely given that the log seemed to have had a lot of entries that looked like errors that recovered on retry, but I'm still bothered by the pristine SMART data. I wonder if it would be possible to surface the hardware error by doing a Unix dd command read, sending data to /dev/null?
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Hi James, My tale of woe (small woe, really): I had been doing weekly backups with QRecall to a ZFS dataset on a single 4 TB drive in an OWC USB 3 enclosure. Everything seemed to be working for some months. Then I decided to do some changes in my system to eliminate spinning drives in the Mac Pro. Since I was losing redundancy in the data source, I wanted to add hardware redundancy in the backup to compensate (sorta). I bought another 4 TB drive and an OWC dual enclosure (ESATA/USB3). I put the new and old backup disks in the dual enclosure, set it up as independent disks. After some fooling around with ZFS I was able to convert the single drive to a ZFS mirror; during the resilver process (which copies data from original backup drive to redundant backup drive, creating the mirror) I got a message saying that one file had an error during the process: /Volumes/ELITE/QRECALL_BACKUP/QRecall eRaid archive.quanta/repository.data. That didn't sound good, so I ran a qrecall verify, which failed, and a repair, which also failed. It looked like there were a lot of POSIX error 5 problems, which probably means the disk or the enclosure is going south. The odd thing is that I have DriveDX, which checks SMART data; the drive SMART data shows no hint of a problem, not a single re-allocated sector or unrecoverable read failure, even though there seem to be plenty of parameters shown. Unfortunately, for some reason a self test is not an option for this disk; I might try moving it to another enclosure and see if that option shows up in DriveDX. I've sent a diagnostic report to Technical Support; wondering if it is worth more effort to try and recover this archive (it's all backup data, after all, the source is currently still intact). If the worst comes to pass I just pull the bad disk, buy another, resilver the ZFS mirror again, and start fresh. Thanks for your advice. Kurt
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As usually seems to be the case, you have anticipated every need with the Combine Items function. Good job, James! Ok, I have run into a wrinkle, and it involves the identity key. I went and got my identity key from the original email, and I pasted it into the place in Preferences. After doing that, the preference window says "Valid permanent key". I created an action to store data from the new computer's disk, and pointed it at the old, existing archive. However, when I try to run the action I get an error window popping up, and it says "Capture requires an identity key. The identity key is missing or invalid. Enter a valid identity key in the QRecall preferences." So, I'm stuck... I thought I pasted my valid identity key in the place where it goes, and the Preferences say it is valid and permanent, but it isn't working. What have I done wrong? Thanks for your assistance, Kurt
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Hi, First off, I wanted to thank you for the new features in version 2.0. They are very welcome, especially the ability to add redundancy to the archive. I'm in the process of migrating from one computer to another. I've been using QRecall under Yosemite under the old computer, and I'm going to be using it under El Capitan on the new computer. I don't know if it matters, but on both the old and new computers I have separate boot and user data partitions. Both user and boot partitions have been getting backed up into a single QRecall archive. The system has been working flawlessly, thank you! Do you foresee any issues with just pointing QRecall on the new computer at the existing archive, and just letting it do a normal backup of both the new El Capitan boot partition and the user partition on the new computer into the existing archive? The new computer's user partition is almost exactly the same as the old data on the computer, just a differently named partition. I'm expecting that it will store a good-sized ~10GB chunk of new unique data into the archive as a result of the operating system change, but otherwise the applications and user data should just be deduplicated, right? If you can think of any subtleties that I might want to address before the migration, I would be grateful to hear them. Thanks, Kurt
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Hi, I'm new to QRecall. I've downloaded the software, and used it a couple of times to backup to an archive using trial keys. It seems very full-featured and robust. I am wondering, though, about whether QRecall detects or protects me in the event that a file goes bad on the source disk I'm backing up; I recall seeing some articles a few months back about "bit rot," the possibility that old, seldom accessed files will silently fail by flipping a bit here or there. Since these files aren't accessed in normal use, the corruption lies possibly undetected for a long time, until one day you access it and you get a disk error, or your JPEG shows artifacts. I know that btrfs and ZFS maintain integrity on source disks by storing extra redundant data; I'm hoping that QRecall might give me some of that robustness and peace of mind, albeit in slices of backups. So, I was wondering if QRecall reads entire source files (all the blocks that comprise file data) during the backup process, or just file meta data? If it reads entire files (of all files, not just files whose meta data indicated a change), what does it do when it detects that the underlying block data has changed, but the meta data hasn't changed? Here is the article that got me thinking about this topic: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/ Thanks for your opinions and advice. Kurt
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