I'm still a Time Machine user, but those days are limited, for all the reasons and limitations that are well known about Time Machine. QRecall is on my short list (other two are Arq and rolling my own). What would make QRecall a slam dunk for me? Add Encryption (I've read that this is coming to the next major release, but haven't seen an ETA on when that will be). And essentially add the features of Arq.

What makes Arq most attractive is that there is an open source tool to do restores (or, in your lingo, recalls). If you provided an open source tool to do recalls, then we can confidently use your software knowing that if some day you go away (for any reason), we aren't stuck with a blob of bits we can't reassemble. And Arq does online backups to Amazon S3, which is great because we can independently verify that our data is secure on our Amazon S3 accounts.

I'd gladly pay a higher price tag for such a product that had the features of QRecall, stored my data in an encrypted format on a local volume or NAS, included an open source tool to perform restores, and included ability to keep offsite backups (with perhaps fewer snapshots to keep offsite storage costs lower).

Welcome, Ryan

Encryption is on the short list of features for the next major release.

I don't have plans to turn any part of QRecall into open source. Open source is a wonderful thing, but it doesn't completely protect you against obsolescence. My response to your concerns is this: Test QRecall and satisfy yourself that it can reliably recall your files. Should QRecall stop working with some future version of OS X, you can always recall your files and migrate them to another backup solution.

What to do about WebDAV based services like S3 is another matter. On one hand, WebDAV backups are great because they're simple and easy to access. On the other hand, they are typically expensive (in terms of cost, time, limited size, and network bandwidth) and would really benefit from QRecall's compression and efficiency.

However, the way QRecall works and the way WebDAV works are like oil and water. What I'd like to offer is a way of efficiently "cascading" an archive from a local disk to a WebDAV volume, so that your principle backup would be local and QRecall would periodically migrate incremental updates to the WebDAV volume. I'm not even close to working out the details, but that's the direction I'd like to go in.

In the nearer term, I do plan to create a command-line version of QRecall. This would be more flexible for those with scripting knowledge, and would also be less prone to breaking when new versions of the operating system come out.

I know this doesn't address all of your wishes, but I hope it clarifies the direction QRecall is headed.

Thanks for the response James!

Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting using WebDAV (unless I'm confused about what WebDAV is). Amazon S3 uses Representational State Transfer via the HTTP protocol (REST). Perhaps the distinction is irrelevant for the purposes of considering adding cloud backup to QRecall, I don't know.

I have no idea of what your implementation is of your product, but it seems to me that it does share some common characteristics with Arq (de-duplication of data, packing/chunking, etc). Anyway, it is something to kick around. I suppose there is nothing keeping me from using Arq and QRecall in parallel, although in doing so I'd probably want to have some control over scheduling, so both products weren't trying to back up at the same time.

Thanks again for the response.

Ryan Sandridge wrote:Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting using WebDAV (unless I'm confused about what WebDAV is). Amazon S3 uses Representational State Transfer via the HTTP protocol (REST). Perhaps the distinction is irrelevant for the purposes of considering adding cloud backup to QRecall, I don't know.

The distinction is largely irrelevant. I only bring up WebDAV because it's been discussed at length on the forum already. All of these protocols are layered on top of HTTP, which just makes them a bad fit for working with QRecall—without some extensive modifications.

Anyway, it is something to kick around.

I'm definitely kicking it around. I'd very much like to provide an off-site or remote backup solution compatible with standard remote file services like WebDAV or S3. I just haven't worked out the details.