We have an capture which runs nightly backing up a 400GB volume.

The archive keeps getting corrupted requiring repair. The repair (first radio button) takes from 12-24 hours, locking up the computer from work for the next day or so.

These 'corruptions' happen either when I pause or suspend a backup.

In one case I needed to pause it for an hour to finish a job, but the computer stops dead when a QRecall backup commences, that I am not able to quit any running applications, they just 'hang'. And the computer completely locks up, I can't even Relaunch Finder. So after waiting for things to come back up, I finally have to restart and the archive gets corrupted.

I read somewhere they you say pausing the capture should be re-startable, and not corrupt the archive. Is this the case?

I have had to do about 5 repairs now since we started with QRecall, and neither suspend nor pause seem to stop QRecall effectively so the computer can be used.

This it is really affecting my productivity!
Please tell me the correct way to work with QRecall in this scenario.

Michelle,

It sounds like you're doing the right thing. If QRecall is too much of a burden on your system, pausing or rescheduling the action is exactly what you'd want to do.

QRecall can never cause your computer to "stop dead." What I suspect is happening is that QRecall and other applications are competing for memory. This results in a situation called "thrashing" where the system spends most of its time swapping memory to and from the virtual memory swap space rather than running code. This results in exactly what you describe: Applications just hang, spinning multi-colored cursors, unresponsive keyboard, changing windows takes forever, new applications don't seem to launch, and so on. This can persist for many minutes.

You can confirm this by starting and running an application that will monitor the system's virtual memory activity. My personal favorite is iPulse, but Activity Monitor or running the 'top' command in Terminal will work too. When your system become unresponsive, you want to watch the virtual memory paging activity. If you see the VM system constantly paging in and out (page in/out numbers going up up up), then your system is thrashing.

If the system is thrashing, you should still be able to pause or reschedule QRecall -- although it might take some patience. Eventually, the memory used by QRecall will get paged out, the memory used by your other applications will get paged back in. and your system should return to normal.

So either be patient or get some more RAM. Also make sure you have plenty of free disk space. The VM systems gets even less efficient if the free space on your startup drive is low.

There are also some other strategies for minimizing interference with your regular work, such as scheduling QRecall to run at night and adding schedule conditions so that it automatically stops before you normally start using the computer.

Hi James

Thanks, I have taken on board what you've said:
The action was scheduled at 11pm but now it is 1am.
The system is an iMac with 2GB memory so I will put more in.
The disk has ~70GB free

I'm using Activity Monitor to watch the memory usage.

The thrashing is the problem though, how long should I wait for the memory to be freed, because I have been waiting 15 mins or longer?
Also if I try to quit other apps, if seems they never completely quit. They stay on Force Quit and even the Finder doesn't relaunch.

I would like to add a condition to not start if the computer is being used, but I can't logout because everything is still open.

So, which is better 'pause' or 'suspend'?
Which one can handle a system restart in the middle?

Michelle Parker wrote:The thrashing is the problem though, how long should I wait for the memory to be freed, because I have been waiting 15 mins or longer?

It's really hard to say without knowing any more details. I admit that 15 minutes sounds like a long time, but it's not unheard of.

I would like to add a condition to not start if the computer is being used, but I can't logout because everything is still open.

No such condition exists at this time. I'll add it to the request list.

So, which is better 'pause' or 'suspend'?
Which one can handle a system restart in the middle?

Pause simply suspends the action, but leaves it running. Stop and Reschedule actually stops the action, closes the archive, and then reschedules it to start again at a later time. You can log out or restart anytime after it stops. The advantage of Pause is that it's almost immediate, where Stop and Reschedule will take longer to finish up.