Switching computers and operating systems - any special considerations?

Hi,

First off, I wanted to thank you for the new features in version 2.0. They are very welcome, especially the ability to add redundancy to the archive.

I'm in the process of migrating from one computer to another. I've been using QRecall under Yosemite under the old computer, and I'm going to be using it under El Capitan on the new computer. I don't know if it matters, but on both the old and new computers I have separate boot and user data partitions. Both user and boot partitions have been getting backed up into a single QRecall archive. The system has been working flawlessly, thank you!

Do you foresee any issues with just pointing QRecall on the new computer at the existing archive, and just letting it do a normal backup of both the new El Capitan boot partition and the user partition on the new computer into the existing archive? The new computer's user partition is almost exactly the same as the old data on the computer, just a differently named partition. I'm expecting that it will store a good-sized ~10GB chunk of new unique data into the archive as a result of the operating system change, but otherwise the applications and user data should just be deduplicated, right?

If you can think of any subtleties that I might want to address before the migration, I would be grateful to hear them. Thanks,

Kurt

Kurt Liebezeit wrote:I'm expecting that it will store a good-sized ~10GB chunk of new unique data into the archive as a result of the operating system change, but otherwise the applications and user data should just be deduplicated, right?

Correct.

If you can think of any subtleties that I might want to address before the migration, I would be grateful to hear them.

What's going to happen is that a new set of volumes will appear in your archive. QRecall will most certainly detect that the volumes you are now capturing are not the one you were capturing. Everything will be captured anew (with data de-duplication), but you'll still get a new layer with every file appearing to be a new version, with no history.

Your old volumes are still in the archive, and will no longer be appended to. When browsing your files, you may have to navigate between volumes if the item you're looking for is before, or after, the transition.

If this is acceptable, you don't have to do anything. If, on the other hand, you'd prefer to have a single history for all of your documents, then you'll want to combine the new volume with the old one.

You're most likely to want this with your user files partition. Navigate to the "owner" level of the archive. Select both the new user partition volume and the old user partition volume, and then choose Archive > Combine Items.... The items in the old volume will be migrated to the new volume, and will appear in the history that precedes the new volume. The old volume will then be deleted.

As usually seems to be the case, you have anticipated every need with the Combine Items function. Good job, James!

Ok, I have run into a wrinkle, and it involves the identity key. I went and got my identity key from the original email, and I pasted it into the place in Preferences. After doing that, the preference window says "Valid permanent key". I created an action to store data from the new computer's disk, and pointed it at the old, existing archive. However, when I try to run the action I get an error window popping up, and it says "Capture requires an identity key. The identity key is missing or invalid. Enter a valid identity key in the QRecall preferences."

So, I'm stuck... I thought I pasted my valid identity key in the place where it goes, and the Preferences say it is valid and permanent, but it isn't working. What have I done wrong?

Thanks for your assistance,

Kurt

Kurt Liebezeit wrote:So, I'm stuck... I thought I pasted my valid identity key in the place where it goes, and the Preferences say it is valid and permanent, but it isn't working. What have I done wrong?

Kurt,

You've done nothing wrong. This is a (*cough*) quirk (*cough*) of OS X's preferences system, which has been covered in other threads.

Simple solution: restart your system and the capture should run OK.