James Bucanek wrote: QRecall will automatically mount a network volume that contains the action's archive, as long as these conditions are met: ...

Alternatively, could you have QRecall run on the machine to which the backup drive is attached, instead of the machine to be backed up? In other words, the archive is local, the item to be captured is a network volume. Can QRecall automatically mount a network drive to back it up?

Context: I'm dealing with a small workgroup, with about 10 to 13 desktops, and I have 3 large hard drives to back up onto, all between 500 and 750 GB each (because you get the most storage per $ in this size range). We use Retrospect Workgroup, which has no problem running on the one machine with attached hard drives and backing up clients as they appear; even though the network often has a hiccup and interrupts one client's backup, the backup set is, of course, undamaged.

I understand that QRecall is not yet as network-savvy as Retrospect. So I've been evaluating the possibility of running QRecall on multiple machines, each mounting the same network drive and waiting its turn to write to the same archive, as you suggested to Eric. Alas, it appears that a network hiccup on a client machine resulted in a very corrupted archive. Got a "header file length invalid", almost 2 hours to run the repair, and the layer from that client trying to back up is marked "-Damaged-", and it doesn't even remember who owns that volume. (Are the older layers OK, do you think? I have deleted the damaged and recovered-items layers; without a known "owner" those layers are fairly useless.)

Irk, I so want to get away from Retrospect already!!!

James Bucanek wrote:

Jaap van Ees wrote:Is this normal behaviour?

This is normal.

After a merge or layer delete, the next capture or compact action begins by going through the archive to find any quanta that no longer belongs to an item. It marks these quanta as "unused." The capture action will then reuse the space occupied by the orphaned quanta. The compact action will remove them entirely.

How long can this take, after a merge action in which no layer were found to merge?

I have a very new archive because I just started evaluating QRecall a couple of days ago. I'm trying to back up 2 systems to the archive-- the one that the backup drive is connected to (Mac A), and another one which mounts the backup drive over the network (Mac B). Mac A backed up to the archive, and did a scheduled merge action, but of course there were no layers to merge yet. Mac B failed to run anything at night because it was logged out, so I'm trying to manually run the capture now. But it's been on "Locating unused space" for over 37 minutes now. Granted it's going to be a little slow using the drive over the network, but what could it be doing??? Should I just quit it and try again? How long should I let it go on like that? Using Version 1.0.1 (1.0.1.9), btw.

EDIT: Happy to report now that somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour after running the action, it is now actively backing up files. So, we're having some progress here.

James Bucanek wrote:
- The user is logged in when the action starts. (The operating system does not permit network volumes to be mounted when you are logged out)

Question about this-- if the user logs out while the action is running, will the action continue to run? thx!