My oldest Mac can only run Snow Leopard, it and my other machines back up to individual FireWire drives. Those drives start to fail from time to time; so far I've been able to anticipate this and have transferred the archives to new ones. I'm starting to consider whether I'd be better served by having a NAS. Reading here I believe that QRecall will use one as only a few problems have been reported. So my questions are:

- am I right in thinking that setting up QRecall to use one is (relatively) easy, and
- if James will allow, might I seek views on the easiest make for a simpleton to use; my reading suggests my choice should be between Drobo and Synology but I may well have missed something.

Views on both points will be much appreciated.

-- Charles

I use QRecall to archive three Macs, all running Mountain Lion, to a Drobo FS which seems to work reasonably well, but can be excruciatingly slow if you need to repair a large archive. This is mainly the fault of the Drobo FS which suffers from relatively slow reads and writes, especially for small files. The new Drobo N is reported to have considerably better performance. As for other types of NAS I don't know, but in principle it should work fine.

I recently tried running QRecall to a firewire drive attached to my server machine, a Mac Mini, but I had all sorts of problems with the drive not showing up on other Macs, especially after waking from sleep. QRecall actions ran much faster than on the Drobo FS but I have had so many issues I have abandoned it for now. Slow and reliable is superior to fast and unreliable in my book.

I hasten to add that none of the problems were directly attributable to QRecall.

Very helpful, thank you.

Yesterday (Sunday) I had a message from Drobo. It advised that the Drobo FS has been replaced by the Drobo 5N and that Drobo doesn't officially support 10.6.8 on any of its current products. This means that a more recent operating system is needed to configure a current unit but that once that is finished any 10.6.8 Mac should be able to access it. The Drobo 5N would however still need to be managed by the computer that configured it. This rather rules out Drobo units from my options.

I have now installed a NAS (Asustor AS-606T) and QRecall is backing up to it correctly. I have however two questions:

1 When using an external drive QRecall was able to back-up when I was logged out at night. Is it possible to arrange this with a NAS (which runs 24/7)? Or must I leave myself logged in 24/7 too?

2 Testing the NAS I made a new archive on the NAS. I never used it and have deleted it. Status Window remembers it and lights its red button to show that the archive has never been used. How do I get Status Window to 'forget' that archive?

Charles Watts-Jones wrote:When using an external drive QRecall was able to back-up when I was logged out at night. Is it possible to arrange this with a NAS (which runs 24/7)? Or must I leave myself logged in 24/7 too?

It depends on how the volume mounts. If the volume mounts as a physical hard drive, QRecall will mount it before starting an action. If the mounts as a remote/network volume, then that requires an account and password, which requires the keychain, which requires that you be logged in and your keychain unlocked when the action runs.

A little experimentation should tell you which method works.

Testing the NAS I made a new archive on the NAS. I never used it and have deleted it. Status Window remembers it and lights its red button to show that the archive has never been used. How do I get Status Window to 'forget' that archive?

Control+click/right-click on that item in the status window and choose Forget from the pop-up menu.

James Bucanek wrote:
It depends on how the volume mounts. If the volume mounts as a physical hard drive, QRecall will mount it before starting an action. If the mounts as a remote/network volume, then that requires an account and password, which requires the keychain, which requires that you be logged in and your keychain unlocked when the action runs.

A little experimentation should tell you which method works.

Unfortunately it mounts as a remote/network volume. It's hard-wired to my modem/router and WiFi from that to my Mac. While back-ups run at an acceptable speed, verify operations are terribly slow at around 6.5 MB/min. As my NAS has 3 drives and uses RAID 5, I'm thinking of cutting back to, say, one verify/month. Or maybe I should hard-wire my Mac to the router? Any views?

James Bucanek wrote:Control+click/right-click on that item in the status window and choose Forget from the pop-up menu.

Thank you. Works perfectly.

Charles Watts-Jones wrote:While back-ups run at an acceptable speed, verify operations are terribly slow at around 6.5 MB/min.

6.5 MB/min is dreadfully slow. Are you sure you don't mean 6.5MB/sec? That's about what I would expect from WiFi.

Verifies are I/O bound. If you have 100Mb ethernet, connecting via ethernet will give you about 10MB/s. If you have Gb ethernet, you should get about 80-100MB/s.

I don't know what your topology is, but consider having a different computer verify the archive. I have several laptops and an iMac that all capture via WiFi, but I use the server that's connected directly to the shared RAID to perform all of the weekly verify and merge actions. Everything is fast.

James Bucanek wrote: 6.5 MB/min is dreadfully slow. Are you sure you don't mean 6.5MB/sec? That's about what I would expect from WiFi.

You're right. As ever my maths missed out some zeros. Now that the verify is finished I find that a 450+ GB archive took just under 20 hours to verify. This (re)calculates to just over 6.4 MB/sec.

James Bucanek wrote: Verifies are I/O bound. If you have 100Mb ethernet, connecting via ethernet will give you about 10MB/s. If you have Gb ethernet, you should get about 80-100MB/s.

I don't know what your topology is, but consider having a different computer verify the archive. I have several laptops and an iMac that all capture via WiFi, but I use the server that's connected directly to the shared RAID to perform all of the weekly verify and merge actions. Everything is fast.

Good idea, I'll try to organise a spare laptop to do the 'heavy lifting'.