How can I find it back in the middle of 555 other windows?

For that, I find exposé particularly handy. You can always launch QRecall and choose Window > Activity Monitor > QRecall Activity to force the activity window to the front.

Also note that QRecall supports Growl.

Also, this little window only tells me what qRecall is doing. It would nice if it was telling me as well what qRecall will do when (i.e. "Currently: idle Next task: merge in 23:45 hours").

That's an excellent suggestion. I'll put that on the to-do list.

It would also be nice to be able to launch the program from the window?

I've considered having a persistent Open Log button in the activity window, which would have the side effect of launching the application.

(Note I have QRecallMonitor and QRecallScheduler in my process list)

FYI: QRecallMonitor is a tiny background application that manages the activity window. QRecallScheduler is a daemon that schedules actions to run.

Frederic Thomas wrote:OK, maybe I was not very clear.

I am not saying it does not calculate fast enough. I am saying it would be best if it was not calculating at that point in time.

Your point is that it needs the calculation to provide "intelligent suggestions". But how good will be these suggestions if any of the accounted for sizes (data and backup sizes) do significantly change?

The assistant performs a number of sanity checks, like making sure you don't start off by trying to capture three times more data than the size of the volume the archive is on. It also make quesstimates about how much data, and how long, you can reasonably expect the archive to hold. All of those checks and suggestions require knowing approximately how much data you're trying to capture.

I agree that things can change, and the various actions created by the capture assistant can deal with those based on your preferences. But I think it's important that you be presented with some reasonable estimate of what can, or can't, accomplish before you begin. While the estimation process might be slow, a failed multi-GB capture is even slower.

Don't get me wrong: I am all for a new good Mac backup solution. And what I have seen so far with qRecall is great. But from a user interface perspective however, I don't think having to wait for 30 minutes to be able to finish a wizard is good. If it takes that long, it should be done in the background, or something...

Yikes, that's way too slow. I think I've got a fair number of files in my home folder (~200,000) and it take less than a minute to estimate my home folder size. If it's taking more than 5 minutes, then something is amiss.

The capture assistant is calculating the size of your home folder about as fast as it can. If you went to the Finder, selected your home folder, and choose Get Info, it would take about as long.

Unfortunately, there's no magic way of quickly determining the total size of a folder without reading every folder it contains and totalling the contents. The capture assistant needs this information in order to make intellegent suggestions.

Jan Sass wrote:Ok, created a new archive with 44b yesterday, pressed 'run' in actions-pane today, and got 'connection with command process closed' after about 5 min. and 17 files backup. backup stoped after some more minutes, stating: corrupted, repair or reindex?

plus: i have backup up only 1 drive, not multiple as in the past.

so, my 44b is broken again, backup data lost.

Your QRecall Helper process is crashing.

Please send me your log files again along with the crash log at ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/QRecallHelper.crash.log and we'll try to figure out what's going wrong.

If you want, we can take this to private e-mail. You can send me the files directly at james@qrecall.com.

Jan Sass wrote:btw: where are the actions aliases stored? i have a 'cant resolve alias ...' in logs

That's nothing to worry about. The aliases in question are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/QRecall/Recent Captures/. They are used by the Desktop Capture/Recall commands to locate the 10 most recently captured archives. Since you've been deleting archives, you have aliases here to archives that no longer exist.

If the messages are bothering you, you can trash the aliases that refer to deleted archives.

Interim release 1.0.0b45 corrects this problem.

Download and install the update by choosing QRecall > Check for updates....

Interim release 1.0.0b45 corrects this problem.

Download and install the update by choosing QRecall > Check for updates....

Jan Sass wrote:You can have all of my logs, if only i knew where to find them (i can view them, but where can i save them?).. Pls advise, and i'll PM them.

Your log files are stored at (your home folder)/Library/Logs/QRecall. You might want to compress them into a ZIP archive before sending them.

So, new backup worked like a charme - thank you. BUT i would like to see the O&V Window removed or at least have an option: always show all drives. This is because i need to back up multiple drives and don't want to to switch between the "master-layers" in O&V-window. is this possible in a future release?

That would be a very difficult and there are some technical problems in doing so. But I'll add your suggestions to the wish list.

Jan Sass wrote:Did so, opened my archive, got th4e message: Open failed, you should reindex or repair.

I'd be very interested in your log files around the time when you unsuccessfully opened, reindexed, and repaired this archive.

In my testing, this bug caused only cosmetic problems. If it is corrupting archives, I want to know how.

This turns out to be a bug (apparently introduced by the compiler). As far as I can tell this only affects Intel Macs.

Download this inter-release version QRecall 1.0.0b44a and see if it fixes the problem.

- Drag your existing QRecall application from the Applications folder to the trash.
- Drag this application into your Applications folder.
- Launch the new version.

The bug affected the composite list of volumes for each layer, making it appear that there was only one volume in the layer. This is why you couldn't select the second volume and when you recaptured your files the capture didn't see the old files and captured everything again.

I misunderstood your original post. You captured four items: A volume (Mac Clients) and three folders (Office 2004, Library, Preferences) on another volume.

Open the Owners and Volumes drawer: View > Show Owners & Volumes (Command+Option+V). Select the other volume in the drawer.

This drawer should open automatically the first time you capture multiple volumes. If it didn't, let me know.

Is Preferences inside Library? That is, did you try to capture ~/Library and ~/Library/Preferences?

Capturing a folder implies capturing all of the items (file and folders) that it encompasses. QRecall ignores all capture items that are contained inside another capture item.

If they weren't nested, I'd be very interested in getting a copy of your log files.

Bruce Giles wrote:Either I'm misunderstanding the purpose of the "Ignore if no archive" condition, or else it's broken.

It's broken. It probably broke on the previous release, which involved significant changes to the scheduler. It will be fixed on the next release.

Bruce Giles wrote:I was playng around a little with the Capture Assistant today. In the time limit section, I selected "Keep 90 days".

I notice the dialog has a footnote, with an asterisk, but I don't see where the matching asterisk in the main text is. Anyway, that's a trivial point.

The asterisks in the button titles were lost. I just fixed that.

I'm not sure what the footnote is trying to say. The first sentence sounds as though the "Keep 90 days" and "Keep 30 days, then less frequently for two years" options might change to other options, depending on what I'm trying to capture, but if that's the case, I haven't seen it happen yet.

That's exactly what it's saying. The suggested schedule changes based on a guesstimate of how much data the archive can capture. The assistant calculates a ratio of the free space on the archive volume (after a hypothetical first capture) to the total size of the items you selected to capture. If the estimated free space on the archive volume is more than 150% the size of the items to capture, it suggests the 90 days and 30 day+3 years schedules. This is based on the assumption that approximately 4% of files will change each day and approximately 40% of the data in those files does not actually change. If the ratio is smaller, the assistant will suggest 60, 30, or 14 day schedules instead.

Of course, these are just estimates and your actual data use can make them wildly inaccurate ? thus, the disclaimer. If you just use your computer for checking e-mail, you could probably keep 10 years of daily changes. If you're editing fresh video footage each day, your archive might overflow in a week.

When the assistant finished, I looked at the results. The rolling merge says:

Keep most recent 3 days
Followed by 57 day layers

I'm pretty sure that's 60 days, not 90.

You're absolutely correct. Looking at the schedule tables, the 90 day schedule was wrong. I just changed it to Keep 7 days followed by 83 day layers.

Also, in this particular case, since the capture is done daily, could the same result be achieved by either:

Keep most recent 90 days

or

Keep most recent 1 days
Followed by 89 day layers?

Yes, if you make exactly one capture a day there's no difference.

(I realize they're not the same if you change the capture frequency.)

Which is exactly why the schedules are a little non-intuative. If you add additional actions to, say, capture your Documents folder every hour or use the Desktop Capture command to take a snapshot of a project folder, the archive will have many intermediate layers during the day. Keeping 3 (or 7) days keeps all of those "micro-backups" for a few days, allowing you to recover the project as it was at 9AM the day before yesterday. After a few days have elapsed, these micro-backups will be merged so that only the last daily version of each file is retained.

Pierre von Kaenel wrote:Why don't I mount volumes manually? This is a laptop and it moves from home to office and back each day. I have remote volumes at both locations and don't want to have to mount/unmount/mount/unmount etc. Plus I have multiple remote volumes at each location used for different purposes and types of backup. (I'm very meticulous when it comes to backups.)

I agree completely. I have a laptop and an iMac in a similar situation.

This is on my to-do list. There are just some technical problems to work out.