I have been using v1.2.3 for months and decided to try out 2.0 beta for the first time. Grabbed the b9 dmg and right after installation QR crashed. Rebooting didn't help. (Yes, all my archives are online and reachable.)

After hours of trials and errors, QR finally opened after the "Actions" folder under ~/Library/Preferences/QRecall had been emptied. As a result, QR did not convert excluded items defined in my actions into QRecall Capture Preferences. I then tried to add them manually in the archive settings, only to find the "+" button broken. It did absolutely nothing when clicked.

Not to be detered, I tried to use drag-n-drop (from finder) instead, and was delighted to find that worked. The joy was shortlived, however, as I soon realized the "-" button was broken, too, and there was no way to remove an excluded item. Can't edit them out from the plist file either as they are now encoded therein.

Next I tried to use the new QRecall Capture Preferences service, only to find it nowhere to be found, not even in System Services Configuration (the one at "System Preferences - Keyboard - Shortcuts - Services"). Reinstalling didn't help.

I finally took the drastic step of reverting my system back to a stage before QRecall was installed, and installed v2 beta 9 without installing v1.2.3 first. The QRecall Capture Preferences service was there, finally, though I had to enable it manually in System Services Configuration.

Time to test it out. I set several folders on my system partition to "Do not capture contents" with the "Exclude from all archives" option enabled, and then back it up to a new archive. It went smoothly, but several excluded folders were still backed up despite the setting. I soon realized the extended attribute wasn't really set because those were privileged folders (owned by root). QR really should ask for permission to set the XA, or at least give a warning about not being able to set the XA. It did neither.

I gave up at this point as my leisure time was up. I'll try again later.

A few suggestions:

1. The ability to save a folder without capturing its content has been one of my most wanted features. Restoring the system partition with QR has been a pain without this feature as I always have to spend much time recreating the excluded system folders with the right ownership and permissions.

The new QRecall Capture Preferences service is thus a great addition, but it needs to be able to work on privileged folders, and I hope the same functionality can be extended to per-archive exclusions.

2. The "Exclude from all archives" option is confusing. I first thought it meant excluding from all archives instead of just this archive, only to realize soon that this is not a per-archive exclusion, so the "Do not capture" setting can't be archive specific. I had to dig out the release notes to know its true meaning. I would suggest something like "Override archive setting" instead.

3. I don't know how difficult this is, but I truely hope there is a way for v1 and v2 betas to co-exist on a system, so I could try out the betas without messing with existing archives and backup routines.

Thanks for the great work. V2 does look promising.

Good to know. I remember seeing the "severity slider" in the help documentation, but have forgotten about it until you mentioned it. A clever and very useful design, indeed. Thanks.

Diag. report has been sent as requested.

Thanks for the tip about the log. I "discovered" it only yesterday. (I probably saw it when checking out the menus in the beginning, but have never used it. I'm used to hunting for logs in the various usual places, so the user friendly design of QRecall log didn't registered. Sorry.)

Speaking of log, I found several peculiar entries that may (or may not) have something to do with the mystery. It's an error message that says "Unable to connect with helper". There are several occurrences in the log, including a recent one at 10:35:21 local time (it's 11:05 right now).

There was one action scheduled around that time, at 10:35 sharp (a "Capture" to a different archive), and there's no log entry of the action (before or after the error), but I'm pretty sure no change was done to the associated source folder, so there's nothing to capture.

Going further back, another "Unable to connect with helper" error was logged at 00:29:22 today, but no action was scheduled then, I believe.

Because the first crash happened when I tried to compact the archive after deleting the newest layer, I decided to try it again, this time on a clone of the archive. Here's what I found:

Action -- result
1. delete the newest layer -- QRecall crashed
2. reopen the archive -- no problem, and I can see the layer is indeed gone
3. verify -- no problem
4. manual recapture of the whole volume -- no problem
5. deleted the newest layer again (the one created by manual recapture) -- no problem
6. verify again -- no problem
7. compact -- NO PROBLEM!


To see if this is a fluke, I deleted the clone, made a new clone from the original archive and tried the following on the original:

Action -- result
1. verify -- ok
2. compact -- QRecall crashed
3. reopen QRecall -- no problem, but there's no entry of the last action (compact) in the log (the one accessible from the "Window" menu)
4. reopen the archive -- no problem
5. delete the newest layer (scheduled capture earlier this morning) -- NO PROBLEM
6. compact again -- NO PROBLEM

The compacting recovered almost 600MB of space after 3+ min., while the layer deleted just now took only 19 MB of space and there's no other layer merged or removed before today. If the compacting that caused the first crash (the one on 2/2) succeeded as you said, it probably didn't "finish" the job, for

1. the successful compacting just now should not be able to recover this much space if the earlier one did its job, and
2. QRecall crashed less than 2 seconds into the action then, but the successful one just now lasted 3+ minutes.

Anyway, the problem seems to have gone away. I'll keep an eye on this archive and report back if I run into any other issue.

No, I've opened the archive many times afterward, and scheduled daily captures have been going just fine since. Verifications (scheduled and manual alike) have never reported any error. And yet every time I try to compact that archive, QRecall crashes. Compacting other archives is never an issue, and I compacted this particular archive successfully before.

Done.

Could you please tell me (or is it documented somewhere) exactly what is sent with the "Help - Send Report" function. The QRecall*.plist files in ~/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter, and the QRecall*.diag files in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports, I gather. Anything else?

Thanks.

Hi,

Yesterday I deleted the newest layer from one of my QR archives, and then tried to compact it afterward. QR crashed, however, as soon as the command started. Verification gave no error after re-openning the archive, and subsequent captures went smoothly. But I can no longer compact the archive; QR crashes each time.

I compact my archives from time to time, and have never run into this before. I can still do it on other archives, just not this one. I tried it one more time just now, with a new log file, which is attached here for your reference.

Just checked my system backup archive against Time Machine's standard exclusion plist (/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist), and here's a list of folders excluded by TM but not by QR, for your reference:

# PathsExcluded

/Library/Updates
/private/var/db/efw_cache
/private/var/db/Spotlight
/private/var/db/systemstats


# ContentsExcluded

/private/var/db/dhcpclient
/Library/Logs


# FileContentsExcluded

/private/var/log
/private/var/spool/cups


# UserPathsExcluded

Library/Logs
Library/PubSub/Database


There are others that I suspect QR doesn't exclude either, but their content is empty on my system so I couldn't tell. E.g.: /private/var/spool/fax & /private/var/spool/uucp in the "FileContentsExcluded" group, and "Library/PubSub/Feeds" in the "UserPathsExcluded" group.

Most of these take relatively little space so I don't really care. In the cases of /private/var/log & /Library/Logs, I'm happy QR backs them up.

Hi,

I'm new to QRecall, so I check the archives more often, just to make sure everything works as expected.

Today I noticed my daily system backup archive, which backs up the system partition (except my user folder) once per day has been making a daily catch of more than 1GB in size even when I did not install/update any applications during that day.

After some digging, I realized QRecall is backing up the whole /System/Library/Caches folder, despite the fact that "Items Excluded by Time Machine" has been checked in my daily Capture action's filter settings. And one file named "data" inside a folder called "com.apple.coresymbolicationd" is the main culprit, for it's 800+MB large, and it changes every day.

I thought /System/Library/Caches is excluded by the Time Machine, is it not?

Anyway, I've excluded it manually, so it's not a big deal. A quick check found that /Library/Caches is indeed ignored by QR. Don't have time to do a thorough check yet.

edit: forgot to mention: my system is Yosemite 10.10.1.