About a year ago, the developer noted, "current version of QRecall can only capture to an archive document on a mounted filesystem."

So what about plans to allow backup to online servers, such as Google Drive, Box, and Amazon S3?

Marc Bizer wrote:So what about plans to allow backup to online servers, such as Google Drive, Box, and Amazon S3?

Investigation is ongoing, but we don't have a solution yet.

The problem with most of these networked file synchronization solutions is that they are file oriented. In other words, you make a change to a local file and that file will be uploaded?in its entirety?to the server. Later, it will be downloaded?in its entirety?back to your other devices.

The bulk of a QRecall archive is a single database file that contains all of your captured data. So if you added a 150K image file to a 100GB archive, a file synchronization service would dutifully re-upload your entire 100GB archive file. This is not only horrifically inefficient, but ludicrously wasteful, and you still need enough local disk space to keep the copy of the on-line archive.

We are actively exploring three different solutions. The first is a simple "cascade" feature what will allow you to incrementally synchronize an off-site archive with a local one. Another is a client/server version of QRecall allowing you to efficiently capture to a QRecall service over the network. And finally, we're exploring leveraging massive database services like Amazon DynamoDB and Redshift, but we've yet to prototype a workable system so we don't know what the performance is yet.

James Bucanek wrote:
The problem with most of these networked file synchronization solutions is that they are file oriented. In other words, you make a change to a local file and that file will be uploaded?in its entirety?to the server. Later, it will be downloaded?in its entirety?back to your other devices.

Are you familiar with the backup utility Arq? It doesn't do data deduplication, but I'm pretty sure that it just keeps an archive of files on Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc. with some sort of index on one's local hard drive. I don't know whether it's possible to send just quanta via these cloud APIs -- have you checked Google's for example?

Another question: if I stored the QRecall archive on an NAS or Time Capsule, would QR automatically mount and unmount the storage volume?

I see QR as a great replacement for Time Machine -- except that you can't use it to restore an entire hard disk, right?

Marc Bizer wrote:Are you familiar with the backup utility Arq? It doesn't do data deduplication, but I'm pretty sure that it just keeps an archive of files on Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc. with some sort of index on one's local hard drive. I don't know whether it's possible to send just quanta via these cloud APIs -- have you checked Google's for example?

We continue to explore these technologies. The problem is they either fall largely into one of two kinds of solutions: file storage or databases. The file storage solutions don't scale well, and the database solutions suffer from unacceptable latency or huge index key sets. But we continue to look at them...

Another question: if I stored the QRecall archive on an NAS or Time Capsule, would QR automatically mount and unmount the storage volume?

Yes. If the archive for a scheduled action is not mounted, the scheduler will attempt to mount it before running the action (and will attempt to unmount it again when the action finishes).

I see QR as a great replacement for Time Machine -- except that you can't use it to restore an entire hard disk, right?

Absolutely, you can. See the help section QRecall Help > Guide > The Basics > Restore Items and Restoring a Volume to a Different Volume. For more sophisticated restore solutions, see QRecall Help > Guide > Troubleshooting > Restoring OS X.