Here is an update on the saga of getting a archive off my two Macs. Sadly no success yet.

To start with a clean slate I deleted all the previous archives and started again. I decided to split the archives between machines to reduce its size.

The Mini is still going and has processed 485GB in 47:25 hours. It has over 1.2TB to backup so at this rate it is going to be far too slow to be practical. Any thoughts on the bottleneck? iStat says CPU use is low and the LAN is running at about 10% capacity.

I created a new archive for the iMac and attempted to backup the 250GB on the internal drive. Seemed to do it okay but got stuck at the end with the message "closing archive" and stayed that way for well over 3 hours. In the end I had to restart the Mac to clear it. I opened the archive and it was empty, no error messages reported. The archive takes up 226GB on the server and the server reported a file conflict with repository.data.

I had a second file server (still WHS, clean patched install) so decided to try this to eliminate problems on the old server. Started a 6 hour limited backup of the iMac internal drive and it completed okay after backing up 100GB. Closed okay after 27 minutes. Removed the 6 hour limit to finish the drive and it finished with the old favourite, a storage error, and suggested I reindex. The reindex failed after reporting damaged records.

Incidentally, my iMac will not blank the screen while QRecall is running, which is annoying. It blanks as soon as the job completes.

I'm just about had enough unless anyone has any other ideas. The combination of slow backup speed and inability to create a single working archive after over a week trying is wearing thin. Obviously other users are happy with QRecall and I hoped it would give me a Mac version of Windows Home Server. Something in my setup must be upsetting it.

Hi James,

Thanks for the quick reply. The current archive is 1.36TB and I probably have another 500GB to add to it depending on the level of duplication. Given the 2TB limit I suspect I am going to have to split the archive anyway until you go 64bit.

Breaking the job up yesterday did answer one of your questions. I broke the iMac backup into 5 sections. The first 2 succeeded (only 500mb needed to be moved of 450GB capture 1 and capture 2 was 60GB). Capture 3 failed with a "Storage or disk error". Capture 4 then started and auto repaired and continued for 4 hours before failing with another "Storage or disk error". Capture 5 then started and reported an invalid header length I need to recreate the index.

It is nice to know 1.6TB backups do work for you so I should be able to get it working.

I'll start working my way through your list of suggestions and post back to the forum how I go.

I have two Macs that I am trying to backup to a single QRecall archive on a network server and after 6 days * 24 hours of continual backing up I don't seem to be getting anywhere.
I have a Mac Mini with 1.1TB spread over the internal drive and a single USB external drive and an iMac with 0.9 TB between the internal drive and an external USB drive. Both Macs are running Snow Leopard.
I am backing up to a folder on a Windows Home Server (file duplication off) on a gigabit LAN. I've seen no sign of power problems and I have recently copied 2 - 3 TB of data to and from the server without any problems.

I continually get "A storage or disk error occurred......the archive is probably damaged" error messages, particularly from the iMac. The Mini seems much less prone to problems and after several attempts I succeeded in backing it up. The difficultly is now getting the iMac to add to the archive. In desperation I have broken the backup job into 4 actions and the second one just failed. Running a rebuild/reindex after a failure takes 24 hours so not something that is practical to do after every second backup attempt.

Is any one else successfully backing up to multi TB archives, which after all, are not that uncommon these days?
It seems very slow once the archive is large. Processing the 430GB on the iMac and moving 500mb of changed data into the archive took 6:10 hours. Then the next backup of the external drive failed so I have a potentially corrupted archive again. Do these speeds sound right for other users? The LAN can easily handle the top speed of a USB drive (30+MB/s).

Any suggestions would be welcome. I am running out of ideas and I the alternative is back to another windows server being backed up to the Windows Home Server which is what I was trying to replace with QRecall. I suppose it is possible there is some interaction with the WHS going on but it is patched to date and has performed flawlessly for the last 18 months.

Thanks

That fixed it. Seems to be starting and backing up without any error messages now.

Thanks for the prompt reply James.

Thanks James, the report has been sent.

Richard

Every time I start QRecall I get an error in the log that says:

Auto-install system components
Could not install monitor
Unable to locate executable in monitor application bundle

QRecall appears to be working okay but I have only been running it a few weeks so I could be missing some functionality and not realise. Any thoughts on the error message and how to fix it?

Thanks!