Wow, that was quick!
Thank you James, and happy coding.

Until recently I had a G5 with a second internal disk called Work, and an attached FW drive called Archive.
"Current work" on Work was captured to a QR quanta, "Current Work" on Archive.

On migration to a Mac Pro, I copied everything from the old "Work" onto a new internal disk called "Work", and at the same time copied all my QR archives onto a separate internal disk called "Archive".

My question is, could I have continued capturing to the new copy of the quanta with the same settings.; i.e. would QR have equated the new Work and Archive with the old Work and Archive?
And if not, could I have changed the settings to point QR in the same direction, but continued capturing to the same quanta in such a way that it would simply have continued recording changes?

The question is academic, because in fact I had some problems with the old archive (since resolved), and before I had the patience to resolve them and work it all out for myself, I had set up a new one, starting from scratch. But for future reference I thought it would be interesting to know the answers.

Also, would it in theory be possible to merge the old quanta with the new one?

Finally, how's progress with the faster, smarter, all-singing-and-dancing version 2?

Many thanks, Nick

James, thank you very much for your persistence. As it happens I have just migrated from PPC/10.5 to Intel/10.6, but have not yet configured my new backups. It seems more than likely that when I do I may have left this particular annoyance behind --though there will surely be other annoyances to take its place. So while it may be irritating for you not to have pinned it down, especially when you have given it so much thought, it does begin to seem a bit academic.

Depending on how much of a backup I hand out to QRecall (until now I have only been using QR to archive small quantities of critical files) I would definitely try to avoid overlapping it with other busy processes --and a more flexible approach to time exclusions would be helpful here.

Many thanks again, Nick

Thanks for the response James, and good to hear that the primary suggestion has made it to the to-do list.

As for the sleep issue, all my actions are set to "After running actions: Do Nothing", so there shouldn't be any power handling glitches from QR, but the problem persists, and does seem to depend on R being active in the night. I have sent you a report in any case.

Is there any reason to suppose that things might be different on PPC/10.5.8 (which I am running now) from Intel/10.6.2 (which I expect to be running next week)?

Hi, I am using and enjoying 1.2 beta, almost without event. Thank you.
One small suggestion: in the Conditions section of the Action settings dialog, you can set an "Ignore Between" time span, but if you press + to add another condition and try to choose "Ignore Between" again, it is greyed out: so you cannot choose two separate time spans. Is this an arbitrary limitation, or would it be tricky to code to allow for multiple time spans here?

It may not be something that you would expect a user to want, but in fact I find that while I want to prevent QR from doing things at the heart of my working day, I also want it to stay inactive at the same time that I am scheduling separate backups in the middle of the night. There are other ways round this I am sure, but the ability to further fine-tune scheduling in this way would certainly be welcome.

What brought this issue to the fore for me was finding my G5 awake in the mornings when it should have gone to sleep as normal after a SuperDuper backup scheduled for 3am. This seemed to be becoming a habit that only started around the time I updated QR to 1.2b, and I found that if I paused QR actions manually the evening before,it would not happen. There would be no QR progress windows showing, and I can't be certain that QR was implicated, but it looks like a probability.

Thanks, Nick

Ah yes, I see it now. Thanks James.

Pretty low priority James; let?s see what 1.2 looks like first.

And on the subject of filters, is there any way to determine the path of a folder in the filters list? For instance I have one action to capture Library and ~Library. I want to exclude the Printers folder in one Lib but not the other. If I drag one of the Printers folders into the filter list, it shows up as ?Printers?. When I come back to the dialogue later, is there any way to determine which folder it is?

And if not, can I suggest a contextual menu? Show in Finder? or a tooltip giving the path? (Perhaps this is taken care of in 1.2?)

Ah, then I misunderstood the help. It would be neat though if you could look through an archive and prune out unnecessary stuff directly. With more than a few exclusions, much easier than doing it with Finder and the Action dialog. Would this be a viable feature request?

In the QRecall Help (Delete Item) it tells you how to delete items from an archive and then says: "You can also delete volumes or folders that you no longer wish to capture."

I know how to add excluded folders to a capture action, but is it possible to delete items from an archive and at the same time tell QR not to capture them in future? That would be a very handy feature, but I can't see how it might be done.

Thanks very much again for your prompt and pertinent response James.

Time is not critical with dead-of-night backups, but data integrity is. Provided that I am in no way compromising the latter, I will continue to run them in tandem.

Sorry not yet to have given you a considered reply to your last post James (working on it), but I had another question stemming from the problem that inspired this thread.

I was assuming that it would be a bad thing to run QRecall captures and SuperDuper clonings concurrently, but I see from my QRT logs that this is what has in fact been happening some of the time, with no apparent ill effects.

Would you consider it bad practice to do this? In some cases SD is cloning the same drive from which QR is capturing parts, in some cases a different drive; in all cases they are writing to different drives.

It would simplify things (and save a little energy) if I could throw all my backup tasks into the same time slot.

Thanks.

Thanks very much James.
I look forward to the "completely redesigned user interface" with mingled excitement and apprehension, only because I have got to know and like the current interface so much. But I guess that if you got it right once, you'll probably get it even righter the next time.

I run a clone of both my HDs to a FW drive every morning at 3am, using SuperDuper. I also have various QRecall schedules to archive critical folders, and one of these is set to run at 4am so as not to compete with the SD backup.

I can set one system wake using the Energy Saver prefpane, but to set two I would have to use something like Power Manager.

It would be neater if I could let QRecall off once SuperDuper had finished, but I am not sure how to achieve this. SD can be set up to fire a script on completion, but I can see no obvious way to make a script initiate a QR action, especially since QR itself is not scriptable. I was wondering whether I could script something to create a condition that QR would recognise and respond to. The only thing I can think of is to have SD's closing script unmount and remount the archive drive, but this seems a bit clumsy. A condition: hold if [xxx.app] running would do it too, but of course there is no such condition.

Does anyone have any better ideas?

Thank you for that very clear (and prompt) explanation of the problem. And thank you too for considering the problem further.

Of course if QRecall was doing its own auto-waking, I would not need another app to do it, and if I did need an independent auto-waker for some reason, then I could disable auto-wake (and its associated daemon) in QRecall. At any rate, the conflict could be documented, and in theory QR could even check for the existence of other 3rd party power managers, and disable itself or put up an alert.
(Does anyone incidentally have any experience of iBeezz or Task3 in comparison to Power Manager?)

I don't think I mentioned that I find the interface of QRecall, especially the archive listings, to be a thing of beauty.

Thank you, I stand gratefully corrected James.
What about unmounting?