I have been very happy with incrementals on QRecall. Normally they have taken about 5-10 minutes on a 600G drive. Today, however, it is about 4 hours and about half done. I do notice in the logs that "filesystem change history expired". I suspect that is the problem. I found in another thread that the 'timeout' is 6.9 days. However, my last backup was only 5 days ago. I tried to read the value by using: defaults read com.qrecall.client QRAuditFileSystemHistoryDays, but it reports it does not exist. Related: is the 6.9 days since last backup or since last full backup? I did an initial capture Feb 5 then subsequently on 8, 10, 13, and 15. Only on the 20th did this full backup occur.

While this is mildly annoying, what is more annoying is that my 12GB real memory system is brought almost to it's knees during the backup process. I read about QRecall using as much memory as it can... I read that with systems over (was it 10GB) it uses 8G of memory. Is that parameter adjustable to reduce the interference with other work especially if it is going to take all day to do it's backup. BTW, I keep VM disabled due to other issues with Mavericks' interaction with VM. Normally I would think that allowing VM would slow things still further. Since the full backups seem to be unpredictable (to me), and since enabling VM requires reboot, it is hard to do even if it is a solution. BTW, top and activity monitor disagree on memory using. Top says kernel is using 15G, AM says 4.87G (might be due to compression?). QRecall helper is using 1.13G and 578M in AM and 10G and 6G in top.

MacOS 10.9.5 early 2009 Mac Pro

Recommendations?

Aubrey Grey wrote:I tried to read the value by using: defaults read com.qrecall.client QRAuditFileSystemHistoryDays, but it reports it does not exist.

If this value is not set in the preferences, QRecall uses the default value of 6.9 days.

Related: is the 6.9 days since last backup or since last full backup?

Neither. It's the amount of time that QRecall has been trusting the file system change events to tell it which directories have changed.

Here's an example. Let's say that you've set up QRecall to capture your Documents folder once a day. On Monday you capture the entire Documents folder for the first time. On Tuesday, QRecall will query the file system change history to determine which folders changed between Monday and Tuesday. QRecall has now been depending on the accuracy of the change history for 1 full day. On Wednesday, it's now been depending on the change history for 2 days, and so on.

When the capture starts the following Monday, QRecall will have been depending on the accuracy of the file system change history for 7 days. That exceeds the default limit. It ignores the change history and exhaustively recaptures the entire Documents folder again. On Tuesday, it will only be using the past 24 hours of change history to locate changes, and the whole thing starts over.

So it's not the time from your last capture. It's the amount of time since the last capture that did not rely on the file system change history.

I read about QRecall using as much memory as it can... I read that with systems over (was it 10GB) it uses 8G of memory. Is that parameter adjustable to reduce the interference with other work especially if it is going to take all day to do it's backup.

Yes. QRecall definitely assumes VM is turned on, and if you turn it off you'll want to "dial back" QRecall's use of memory. Advanced settings can be found on the advanced settings page.

The setting you're interested in is QRPhysicalMemoryMB. Set it to a value (in megabytes) less than the amount of physical RAM you have, say something between 3072 and 4096. QRecall will try to keep it's index and lookup memory footprint within that limit. Caution: lowering this value might reduce QRecall's ability to cache index data, and thus slows the capture process. But that's a reasonable trade off if it means you can still use your computer.

Thank-you. Where do I find the 'advanced settings page'?

Aubrey Grey wrote:Where do I find the 'advanced settings page'?

I apologize that the link in the previous post isn't more obvious.

You can find it under the Cookbook and FAQ forum, or here's the plain link: http://forums.qrecall.com/posts/list/66.page