Hello,
Silly question here: I was playing around with the Status Window and told it to "forget" one of my archives. Now I can't figure out how to add that archive back to the Status Window again. How can I "remember" an archive?

Thanks!

No silly questions...

Archives are automatically added to the status window whenever they are captured or verified.

The "Forget?" command is for archives that no longer exist, or you are not actively using, and you don't want to be constantly reminded of the fact that you haven't captured any new items to them in an overly long time. (There are also options to silence the capture and verify alarms, without forgetting the archive entirely.)

If you've accidentally forgotten an achieve you are still using, it will eventually reappear on its own.

Ok, great. Thanks. It hasn't come back yet but it's not an issue because I don't look at the status window very often anyway. I was mostly just curious.

I do have another question if it's ok to ask it in this same thread:

What is the most efficient order or operations? Capture, merge, compact, and then verify?

My main archive is on a NAS so the operations all happen at different intervals (captures every day, but merges, compacts, and verifies happen less frequently) but now I have another archive on an external SSD. The SSD is only connected every once in a while (usually after I've finished an important project), so I want it to do all operations while it's connected.

It's set to do operations as soon as the disk is connected so it captures right away and then I changed the "delay run" settings so that after the capture it will merge, then compact, and then verify (each of those operations is delayed a minute later than the previous one?in other words, merge is delayed one minute, compact by 2 minutes, and verify by 3 minutes).

Is that a good way of doing that? Is there there a better way?
Thanks!

Steven,

In general, you've got it in the right order: capture, merge, compact, verify.

Merge has nothing to do until something is captured and time has passed.
Compact has nothing to do until something is merged (or manually deleted).
Verify always verifies everything, but will be slightly faster after a merge and compact because there's less data to verify.

Now, if your goal is for your computer to spend less time maintaining the archive, there are some techniques for running the big actions less often.

Using less aggressive actions

Compact is optimized so that if there's nothing to remove (post merge), then the command will finish immediately. Similarly, if the compact determines that only a small amount of space would be recovered, it also stop immediately and reevaluates again the next time it's run.

So the capture and compact command can be scheduled to run every time the volume connects, and they won't waste hardly any time.

Merge, like compact, will first determine if there's anything to do and, if not, will stop almost as soon as it was started. So you can schedule the merge to run repeatedly, but if you configure it so the first tier to merge is broad (say with week tiers), then there will only be layers to merge once a week. If the first tier to merge is month tiers, then it will kick in once a month. And, subsequently, the compact won't have anything to do until something is merged.

Using schedule conditions

Finally, you probably don't need your verify to run daily (unless you're paranoid). Once or twice a month should be sufficient. To accomplish that, you'll need to do a little schedule hacking.

Change your the verify action's schedule to something less often (say the 2nd and 4th Friday of the month). Now the verify will start at a specific time. But what if your archive isn't connected? If not, the action will simply fail with an "archive not found" error.

The trick is to add a "hold if no archive" condition to the action's schedule. This tells the action to start, but if the archive isn't online it will simply pause until it is. In your activity monitor you'll see "Verify My Archive ... waiting for archive". When you do finally connect it, the waiting action will immediately resume, perform its action, and go away until the next interval.

You can also use this technique on the other actions too, as an alternative.

Bonus tip: if the entire drive is dedicated to QRecall archives, you might consider adding a "cancel if free space ..." condition to your compact action's schedule, which will prevent the compact from running at all until the free space of your drive drops below a particular threshold. This usually prevents the capture action from doing anything for months, and then?boom!?it performs one massive (highly efficient) compact, and it's done for another season.

Let use all know if that helps.