Right now one big difference for me is that Time Machine can only backup to an external disk -- Apple pulled the Airport Disk functionality right before release. On my laptop, I don't want to have to have an external drive plugged in all the time, and Qrecall works just fine with my Airport Disk.


Steve

I've upgraded to Leopard, and to b48. I have the same problems: Problem connecting to scheduler, Comms socket broken, then eventually okay.

After a little more configuration and use, an ignore option seems even more like a good idea. Although the work around you suggested of selecting specific folders to restore would certainly work, it requires a lot of selection effort when only a few folders need to be ignored.

In the iTunes case, say when a whole home directory was being backed up, and with just the Podcasts folder to be "ignored", it would be necessary to individually select for restore all folders at the same hierarchy level as "Music", and then a bunch of subfolders within Music, and then every artist folder in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music except for the Podcast one.

The trouble is the risk of human error, and the amount of time and double-checking, and these are the very things that cause people *not* to back up - when it becomes (seemingly) too much trouble. Of course, if something serious was going to get deleted through error, then it should have been in the backup action to start with. But this comes down to one of those "how much work/time will you lose if you don't back up" decisions, traded off against disk-space and other constraints.

In short, I think the "ignore" type of exclusion is really important.

I think a similar issue arises with the hidden folders...the Go To works, but it could be a lot of effort with things like .svn, especially in documents that are bundles (eg, Ulysses projects), and where one would have to view the package contents to find the hidden folders. If I could easily see/ignore/exclude/include hidden folders and sub-folders without having to use Finder tricks it would make me feel more comfortable knowing exactly what I am backing up.

I think we should always know exactly what is being backed up, and will be restored, and both these issues affect that.

I have some issues/suggestions re the Exclusions...

1) If I read the Help file correctly, when I exclude something, and then restore a directory, anything excluded would be deleted. I would like to be able to exclude files or folders in a way that they are totally ignored - neither archived nor restored. An example here would be podcasts. They exist in my iTunes folder hierarchy, and at times they take up a lot of space, so I don't want to back them up - I can always re-download them if I need to. But if I excluded them, and then had to restore the containing iTunes folder, they would be deleted.

2) Because of this, to "exclude" certain directories/files, the only way I can see at the moment is to explicitly include all files/folders other than those to be "ignored". So, in the iTunes case, I would have to include, say, every Artist folder at the same level of the hierarchy of the Podcasts folder - that's a lot of work, and it also means that every new folder that gets created would have to be explicitly added (and may not be done so in time for a critical backup). It would be better to have an overall include, excluding ("ignoring") some of the folders/files underneath a certain level.

3) My home directory is around 60GB, but I only really need to backup about 12GB of this. So, I'm forced to use the clumsy "include just these folders" approach I've suggested above. The final problem here is that I don't think I can inlcude hidden files/folders (say, a .svn directory in home) in the current system.

I'm still just trialling the app, so I may have missed something, but so far it seems there needs to be a better way to do includes/excludes.