I backup both Leopard and Snow Leopard machines to the same archive. Before I install v1.2.0(35) beta on the Snow Leopard machine I want to confirm that it's OK to run different versions on the two OSs.

Ralph

Ralph Strauch wrote:Before I install v1.2.0(35) beta on the Snow Leopard machine I want to confirm that it's OK to run different versions on the two OSs.

Yes, you can use different versions.

If you want to open archives written with the lastest version (b35) on a system running Leopard, I recommend that you upgrade the computer running Leopard to version 1.2.0b34. This is a special release of b33 that accepts the larger icon data records written by b35. See the release notes for the gory details.

The new version (b35) doesn't change the format or structure of the archive in any way. It does, however, capture a lot more icon data than earlier versions. This had an unexpected consequence for earlier versions that assume a file's icon data record would never exceed 32K. The new icon data can easily exceed that (by several times), which causes versions earlier than b34 to be grumpy; they won't display icons of items with the large records (even though the icon data is compatible) and they refuse to verify the archive. Version b34 simply accepts that some data records can be larger than 32K; everything else works the same as it did before.

Other than that, the versions are interoperable. All of the really important actions (capture, recall, merge, compact) work across all versions. That's because a file's icon data record is only used for display purposes and is not considered to be an essential part of the file. QRecall, therefore, ignores any problems that it might encounter with a file's icon record and just keeps going.