I am just evaluating QRecall. I started a capture of a 500GB disk. First I tried clicking on Capture in the Archive Window after creating a new Archive and creating a new action. I discovered that the Action I created was ignored and it was just doing a complete capture of the disk ignoring the action. I also noticed after about 4 hours it was stuck about 2/3 through showing a speed of 6MB per minute. Reading this forum I thought it was probably being held by the Time Machine bug so I decided to unclick the item about using the Time Machine info for skipping. Then I tried to stop the capture. I found no way to kill it! there Suspend icon is grayed out and even quitting QRecall does not stop it (as advertised). I tried creating a new Archive and switching to that but when I tried a new capture it insisted in using the old one. I finally deleted the archive tree but the file system would not release the space and I rebooted. Then I could start over.

Is there an approved method of stopping a capture without rebooting the computer?

I am using 10.9.5 and QRecall 1.2.3.

I hope the above was sufficiently complete to get the idea. BTW, a full TM backup only took 3 hours and a full Carbon Copy Cloner backup roughly the same, so being only 2/3 done in 4 hours was not really what I expected.

Aubrey Grey wrote:I am just evaluating QRecall. I started a capture of a 500GB disk. First I tried clicking on Capture in the Archive Window after creating a new Archive and creating a new action. I discovered that the Action I created was ignored and it was just doing a complete capture of the disk ignoring the action.

Aubrey,

You can create QRecall actions to do things (like capturing files), or you can capture items immediately and directly in the QRecall archive window. The two are independent of one another.

I also noticed after about 4 hours it was stuck about 2/3 through showing a speed of 6MB per minute. Reading this forum I thought it was probably being held by the Time Machine bug so I decided to unclick the item about using the Time Machine info for skipping.

It probably just had a lot of work to do. A QRecall archive is essentially a huge database. As the database grows (as it will when you add 500GB of data to it), it occasionally has to take a pause and restructure the index files it uses to find things. This usually only happens a handful of times during the life of an archive, but will definitely happen at least once when adding 500GB of new data.

This causes the capture action to "pause" while the database is being restructured. Even if you cancel the capture action, QRecall may still require a lot of time to finish this restructuring before it can finish with the archive.

Then I tried to stop the capture. I found no way to kill it! there Suspend icon is grayed out and even quitting QRecall does not stop it (as advertised).

If you started a capture directly in the browser window, a modal sheet in the archive window should display it's progress and that sheet has a stop button. If the capture was started by an action, the activity monitor window (Window > Activity Monitor) will show its progress, and it also has a stop button.

Every QRecall archive action runs in its own process (named QRecallHelper). Action processes also respond to the standard SIGTERM signal, so a kill <PID> command is the same as mashing the stop button in the UI. Note that all of these methods send a request to stop the action. The action will try to honor that request, gracefully stopping the action, and safely closing the archive. This can still take some time, anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or more.

I tried creating a new Archive and switching to that but when I tried a new capture it insisted in using the old one.

I'm not sure what was going on there. I'll need more details.

I finally deleted the archive tree but the file system would not release the space

A file's space is not reclaimed by the UNIX filesystem until all processes that are accessing that file have closed it. This is true even if you've delete the directory record for that file. So until the original capture action was done, the first archive will continue to occupy disk space.

and I rebooted. Then I could start over.

That will do it.

BTW, a full TM backup only took 3 hours and a full Carbon Copy Cloner backup roughly the same, so being only 2/3 done in 4 hours was not really what I expected.

Time Machine, CCC, and the like copy files. That's all they do. QRecall is doing block-level data de-duplication on every file you capture. This is orders of magnitude more complicated, and vastly more computationally intensive. QRecall is also generating data integrity checks for every directory, file, and block of data so it can later determine if any of your captured files have been compromised. Time Machine and CCC don't do any of that.

Thank-you... I understand a little better.