I back up both a MBP and an iMac to the same archive, and the paths to excluded items in my archives seem to depend on which computer I'm looking at them with rather than on which drive the files are actually on. For example, I have a folder named "don't backup" on the desktop of the MBP, and when I open the archive on the MBP the exclusion shows up as -/Desktop/Dont backup, while on the iMac, the same exclusion shows up as iMacHD/Users/ralph/Desktop/Dont backup. (The full path shows up here because I'm backing up the iMac from my wife's account and it's pointing to a nonexistent file in my account.) The same thing is true in the other direction, Excluded files on the iMac show up on the MBP as nonexistent files there.

I guess this may work out OK in practice because the files that need to be excluded are the ones on the computer doing the backup and those paths are correct, so the paths to nonexistent files that are really on the other computer just get ignored. It can be confusing, though, to look at the exclusions list and see a bunch of nonexistent files.

Related problem: Because I didn't have my exclusion lists properly sorted out in one of my archives, a large bunch of normally excluded fine on the iMac got swept into my backup and ran my drive out of space. I started deleting them from the iMac, which is USB2, then realized that I could do it much faster from the MBP, which is USB3, so I moved the backup drive to the MBP. From there, when I open the archive and select a file to delete, but when I hit the Delete button I get a window that says "Waiting for Archive," and nothing happens. It's telling me this while the archive is sitting there open in front of me. What's blocking the delete function on the MBP? (report sent)

OK, Thanks for that explanation. I knew that OSX needed a fair amount of headroom on boot disk for OS functions, but had just assumed that no headroom was needed on an external data disk. It's good to have that misperception corrected.

I'm trying to add error correction to one of my backup drives I?m getting ?insufficient space? errors. The archive is 1.23tb, drive has 197gb free, and I?m using 1:8 redundancy. The first time it happened I had just cleaned some files off the drive and though maybe qrecall hadn't updated it reading of the drive, so I quit qrecall and restarted it, Same result.

I installed error correction on my other backup drive yesterday an it went smoothly.
I've filed a report.

I'm starting a new thread because this involves different problems than we've been discussing, on my iMac this time, rather than on my MBP. I've been getting this "system clock. . ." message repeatedly for the past three days (since starting to use v2 on this computer). These are scheduled 1am backups.

Other strange things also seem to be happening. A few files have been "recaptured" for some reason, and yesterday afternoon the app ran a verify action that seemed to start all by itself. One capture died after a "broke stale lock file" entry. I'm sending a Report.

Is it safe to make another try at adding error correction now, or should I wait for the next release?

I threw away the files you suggested and repaired the archive, and everything seems fine. I'm doing another backup now. The repair log listed about 3 dozen instances of "invalid data," mostly just a few hundred bytes but one chunk of half a megabyte. Should I be concerned about these at all.

Qrecall continues to be a great app, and one of it's finest features is the quality and responsiveness of the support that comes with it. Thanks again, James, for all you provide.

Ralph

I just started qrecall to see what would happen. Watching it on Activity Monitor it just began to gobble up memory, even though I wasn't asking it to do anything. Sample from Activity Monitor attached. By the time I force-quit it, it was using 32gb of memory, I only have 16.

It's been a busy evening. I started to write this response before your last reply, which came in the middle of the chaos described below.

The repair I started on the drive with the Error Correction problem has been running for almost six hours and I just force-quit it because it's generated a log of more than 45GB so far and if I don't turn it off before I got to bed it will fill my drive before I get up. It seemed to go through the first part of the repair cycle normally, then when it switched to "reindexing . . ." it started generating lines in the log that shows up in the app like this

Action 2015-10-30 21:40:36 Warning ignoring problem reading checksum; assume data is valid
Action 2015-10-30 21:40:36 problem reading checksums
Action 2015-10-30 21:40:36 Position: 483863340
Action 2015-10-30 21:40:36 Length: 4

thousands of them, one after another. The basic interval between one Position and the next was 4, the position number itself changed from one block to another from time to time. When TechTool Pro gave em a low disk space warning I checked and saw my disk space disappearing at a notable rate. When I shut it down the Qrecall Log in ~/Library was over 45gb. Qrecall didn't respond to the stop button, so I had to force quit it.

The log in the app now shows only a segment of the repetitive lines; the earlier stuff before that didn't survive the shut down. I started to send a report, but stopped it when it was still "compressing" after half an hour. I was in the middle of watching something on TV, running back and forth during commercials. When I came back at the end of the show, Activity Monitor showed qrecall still taking a lot of cpu, then shortly thereafter I got a system message that I was out of system memory because of Qrecall and needed to force quit applications, most of which were showing "paused" (including Safari, where I had most of this post written. Luckily I was able to resume it.)


So my current situation is that I'm sitting here with my backup drive unplugged and Qrecall not running. If I mount the drive it makes clicking noises even though nothing on the computer seems to be activating it. If I start Qrecall (with the drive mounted or not) and do nothing else with it, Activity Monitor shows it as "not responding" and gobbling up increasing amounts of memory (over 20gb not doing anything.

This computer now shows the 45gb Qrecall log generated while the archive repair was reindexing, along with a couple of smaller logs generated after that. Let me know if you would like any of that material. or other information I can provide. I'm about to head off to bed now, and will pick this up in the morning. I'm thinking now that my next step should be to reinstall qrecall and see if that lets it start without immediately gobbling up memory. Is that a good starting point, or not?

If I can get qrecall running properly again, then I can worry about whether this archive can be save, or will just have to be junked. I'm very glad right now that I had a pair of backup drives, and ran a backup using v2.0 on the other drive before these problems occurred. It's mounted on my other computer right now doing a Verify, which I hope will come out OK.

I just tried to backup to my second archive, the one where I had the problem installing Error Correction. Qrecall now tells me that that archive needs reindexing, so I've just started a repair. Qrecall Monitor is showing Idle, while Qrecall is showing the repair in progress. I don't remember if that's standard, or not.

Here's the rest of the story. The backup continued to run and I watched its progress in Qrecall Monitor. When it got about 1/8" from the end of the status bar it stopped progressing. I checked Activity Monitor and it showed Qrecall Monitor also "not responding. so I force-quit both Qrecall and Monitor. I tried to restart Qrecall and couldn't, so I shut down and restarted the computer. As I was doing this I found most of the other apps I was running had also frozen and I ended up doing a hard power down reset. I don't know whether Qrecall was the cause of all of this, or it was just coincidental.

I'm back up now and it looks like my backup was completed, according to the log. I just sent a Report. At some point I'll try to verify the backup and see what I get, but I may go ahead first with a backup to my second archive, since the backup operation itself seems OK. I won't do anything more to install Error Correction until I hear from you.

I have two drives containing essentially the same archives, one of which is normally stored offsite. I followed your direction to have both of them mounted when I first ran v2.0. I then started a backup into one of the drives, and looking at things like the archive settings on the other, and decided I could probably turn on Error Correction on the second archive while I was still backing up on the first. Initially, that seemed to work, but at about 56gb in to a 1tb archive, qrecall crashed and the error correction froze. The backup on the first drive is still running, so I'm assuming that it will complete satisfactorily. (Activity Monitor shows Qrecall as "not responding" and shows three instances of Qrecall Helper running, two active and one inactive. I don't want to force quit quit while the backup is running, but once it finishes I'll restart qrecall and send you a report. I'm running OSX 10.11.1 on a 2014 rMBP.

Question: Once I get this computer backed up to both archives I have a second computer to back up to both as well. Should that computer, as well, have both drives mounted when I run v2 for the first time?

Restarting the computer solved the problem. That seems like something I should have thought of to try myself.

I sent a report before rebooting.

I've just installed v2.0.0b19 and tried to run a backup. I keep getting the following error message.

"The scheduler service could not be contacted. Quit and reopen the QRecall application to reinstall the scheduler."

I've quit and restarted Qrecall and even reinstalled Qrecall, but I still get this message. After reinstalling Qrecall the log shows "Installing system components" followed by "Cannot connect to scheduler."

James,

Perhaps you should make a more widely available announcement about this. I've been using v1.2.3 with El Capitan since it came out, with no discernible problems except for a glitch yesterday that triggered a massive recapture with almost 100% duplicate data that I thought was the result of a network glitch. If this version isn't capable of accurate restoration, though, it's definitely time to switch to the v2 beta.

I tried to add an additional excluded folder today to a capture action in v1.2.3( and find that I can't add files to the Capture or Exclude lists within the action, nor can I change the archive to which the action point. I still can remove files from the Exclude list, but that seems to be the only file-related change that's possible. Behavior is the same on both computers that I back up with Qrecall. Both are upgraded to El Cap, so I wonder if that's the source of the problem.

I can get along without the change until I move over to v2, so I don't think you should spend any time fixing this, but I thought you should know about it

Ralph