I am attempting to capture my home folder using the Capture Assistant. I have noticed that if Capture Assistant is not the active application, disk activity (I think it is scanning my home folder for files) ceases. I was wondering if this behavior is by design or is there some setting that will allow background processing?

My home folder contains a lot of small files, so the scanning operation is taking a long time (currently 45 minutes for 16.3 Gb and still counting...). I assume this is normal behavior.

Best regards,
Rick

Richard Kontra wrote:I am attempting to capture my home folder using the Capture Assistant. I have noticed that if Capture Assistant is not the active application, disk activity (I think it is scanning my home folder for files) ceases. I was wondering if this behavior is by design or is there some setting that will allow background processing?

Oddly, it is by design. I say oddly, because I went and looked at the code and (sure enough) it deliberately stops scanning when the assistent window isn't active. Which is strange, because I can't think of any good reason why?although I clearly had one when I wrote it...

My home folder contains a lot of small files, so the scanning operation is taking a long time (currently 45 minutes for 16.3 Gb and still counting...). I assume this is normal behavior.

I would guess no. I have some folders that I use for testing which contain over a million tiny files, and the assistent can sum them up in less than 10 minutes. So either the scanner is stuck or you have a frightening number of files. If you really do have a few million files, you're just going to have to wait. If not, I'd quit QRecall, relaunch it, and try again, this time leaving the assistent window active.

Looking over the code, I realized just how dated it was (written circa OS X 10.4), so I took some time to rewrite the scanner using moden APIs and thread management. The new code is significantly more efficient and won't stop if you switch away from the assistent window. Sadly, you'll have to put up with the way it works now until the the new code migrates into the next beta release.

James

James,

Thank you for the very informative reply. The scanning/indexing took about another 1/2 hour and the backup went flawlessly. There were approximately 350,000 files comprising 42 Gb. It was a welcomed surprise to move through the catalog with such speed. Looking forward to backing up on a daily basis .

Regards,
Rick