Does QRecall have an equivalent to Retrospect "grooming"?

That is, is there a way, when an archive grows too large, to automatically delete one or more of the oldest incremental backups? (Not delete particular files from the backup, but rather delete everything from one point in time.)

Jonathan Bullard wrote:That is, is there a way, when an archive grows too large, to automatically delete one or more of the oldest incremental backups?

This feature in fundamental to QRecall. QRecall refers to them as "rolling" incremental backups.

QRecall's "merge" action combines any set of adjacent layers (incremental captures) together; QRecall preserves only the most recent version of each item in the layer set, discarding older versions in the process. You can merge the oldest two layers, discarding the oldest version of each item, or merge any arbitrary group of layers in between, consolidating more recent changes while still preserving older ones.

You can preform merges manually, design your own to occur automatically, or use the intelligent "rolling merge" action. Merge actions can be scheduled to run on a regular basics or run only when some condition is met (i.e. merge oldest two layers whenever the free disk space is less than 10%). The capture assistant will create a schedule like this for you.

The rolling merge action is particularly sophisticated. It creates a set of time frame "tiers" going backwards in time: a number of days in the past, followed by a number of weeks in the past, followed by a number of months, and finally years. Each time time a rolling merge runs, it combines all of the layers (incremental captures) in each time frame into a single layer. The result is a set of layers containing the most recent items at the end of each day, then going back in time the most recent item at the end of each week, then each month, then each year.

This gives you incredibly fine grained control on how long you keep individual items changes, and how long you keep old items.

(Not delete particular files from the backup, but rather delete everything from one point in time.)

You can do that too.