Question: I automatically back up my Home folder every night, and exclude everything else.

I highlight the /Applications folder and using the Services menu, do a one-time "Capture to QRecall Archive".

What will happen to the /Applications folder contents archived if I don't do that again? Will they remain forever (or at least until replaced by another one-time capture?), or will they be deleted from the archive by a future rolling merge?

Steven J Gold wrote:Will they remain forever (or at least until replaced by another one-time capture?)

This is the correct answer. They will remain forever ... unless recaptured or manually deleted.

or will they be deleted from the archive by a future rolling merge?

They can never be deleted or replaced by capturing something else.

The fundamental, conceptual, model of QRecall is that each layer captures just what has changed in the captured items. And merging layers containing the same items combines them into a single set of changes, essentially creating a single layer as if the earlier captures had not happened.

In the case of an archive with two non-overlapping items, there's nothing to merge[1]. So recapturing your home folder will never combine with or replace any data captured in your /Applications folder, or items captured from another volume, or items captured by another owner. Those items are in other branches of the archive.

Let us know if that helps clarify the concept.

Footnote [1]: That's not, technically, true although it's conceptually true. If you capture /Applications you have a layer with /Applications. Then if you capture your home folder you now have a second layer with just your home folder. When these layers are merged, you end up with a single layer containing both /Applications and your home folder, just as if you had performed a single capture of those two items. But since these items don't overlap, no items are combined. Again, the same thing happens when you merge layers with items captured from different volumes.

Thanks for the explanation -- that's the behavior I had hoped for.

Now suppose next month I do another one-off capture of /Applications but in the meantime, Apple has updated some of the apps and I have deleted some I was no longer using. In this case, the updated apps will be captured and the old versions of the updated apps will eventually disappear from the archive, correct? And same thing for the apps in /Applications which have been deleted (and not replaced) since the last capture of /Applications, correct?

Steven J Gold wrote:In this case, the updated apps will be captured and the old versions of the updated apps will eventually disappear from the archive, correct? And same thing for the apps in /Applications which have been deleted (and not replaced) since the last capture of /Applications, correct?

Correct and correct!