I have just had to restore my system after it locked and wouldn't reboot. I tried doing it several ways over the last couple of days. My main archive had 310 layers in it and after I restored from the most recent layer, I discovered that items and applications that had previously been deleted had also been restored, which was not quite what I wanted. I also discovered that the restore process was much faster if I erased the target drive (in the order of twice as fast)(170 GB). What I eventually ended up doing was to copy the archive to another location and merged all the layers in that copy down to one and restore from there.
That gave me what I wanted, I couldn't find this sort of info in the help system, James would it be worth putting some more info on your "Restoring OS X" page?
Thanks
Gavin

Gavin Macfarlane wrote:I discovered that items and applications that had previously been deleted had also been restored

Gavin,

It sounds like you had the Show Deleted Items option enabled in the View menu. With this option set, any recall action will recall not just the most recent items, by all previously deleted items from earlier layers.

When you merged all of your layers, those previously deleted items were permanently removed from the archive, so the Show Deleted Items option now had no effect (since there were no deleted items to show/recall anymore).

There's a stern warning in the help about recalling packages and volumes with this item turned on, but I'm considering adding a warning dialog to the recall command. Showing deleted items makes it really easy to find and recall lost documents, but it's not an option you want turned on when recalling packages, applications, or system files.

I also discovered that the restore process was much faster if I erased the target drive

When you recall/restore over existing items, QRecall takes the time to compare what is being recalled with what's already on the volume. QRecall then only modifies what's changed. By erasing the volume first, you saved QRecall that work.

It sounds like you had the Show Deleted Items option enabled in the View menu. With this option set, any recall action will recall not just the most recent items, by all previously deleted items from earlier layers.

Hi James, yes, that is correct, I did have show hidden items turned on, I turned it on when i started using QRecall to see what was happening (I'm fairly inquisitive) and hadn't turned it off again.
So for future readers, if I had not had Show Deleted Items turned on, the restore would only have brought back current items at the time of the latest layer and not everything. Well I won't do that again

It also raises the question of the Show Invisible Items menu item, does that behave in the same way? I would hope not

Thanks again James.

Gavin

Gavin Macfarlane wrote:It also raises the question of the Show Invisible Items menu item, does that behave in the same way? I would hope not

QRecall tries to be as WYSIWYG as possible. When you perform a recall you'll recall exactly what you see in the browser window.

The exception is invisible files. When recalling a folder, all of the files that folder contains (both visible and invisible) are recalled, irrespective of the view settings.

I wish I had found QRecall earlier, so much time spent on less worthy software could have been saved...

One question I could not easily work out with the excellent test scheme is how to perform a full restore of a hard disk.

I have run into situations where I wanted to do that with Retrospect and it was not always a great experience.

I guess I could restore a full HDD and see whether it works the way I expect but maybe there are more people interested how QRecall will handle this, thanks!

Dr. D wrote:One question I could not easily work out with the excellent test scheme is how to perform a full restore of a hard disk.

Finally, an easy question.

To restore a volume, you must first have captured a whole volume (not just some files and folders in that volume).

To recall the contents of a captured volume to the volume it was originally captured from:

Select the volume icon in the archive.

Choose Restore from the Archive menu.

To recall a captured volume to a different volume (i.e. not that one it was originally captured from):

Select the volume icon in the archive.

Hold down the option key and choose Restore Volume To? from the Archive menu.

Select the volume you want to overwrite.

Alternate method:

Drag the volume icon from the archive and drop it into the volume icon you want to overwrite.

QRecall will ask you if you want to recall the contents of the volume into a folder, or replace the entire volume. Choose the later.

In all of these situations, the original contents of the volume will be erased. See Help > QRecall Help > Guide > The Basics > Restore Items > Restoring Volumes.

Caveats: You must use the same (or later) major version of OS X to restore a system (bootable) volume. In other words, to restore a bootable 10.7 volume you should be running 10.7 or later. You cannot restore a 10.7 system volume while running 10.6, for example. The reason is that recent major releases of OS X have introduced new filesystem features (like hard-linkable directories and compressed data forks). Earlier versions of the OS are incapable of recreating these new features, and the volume cannot be restored property.

Performance tip: If your drive is fast, erasing the volume first usually results in better recall performance. If it's on the slow side (say, an external drive connected via USB), or if the drive reads significantly faster than it writes, then letting QRecall individually replace the existing files with the recalled ones is usually faster.

Amazing responsiveness, thanks!

I will definitely try that out and I appreciate you spelling it out, since I probably would have tried the drag and drop if you had not answered.

It is so rewarding to see software that seems to anticipate the needs of the user, keeping it tucked away until the moment comes to use it, a sure sign that its creator really knew what he was doing!

Many thanks for enabling such an experience!