Here are my requirements:

- back up system drive, and keep data for a couple of weeks at most. this backup would have the purpose of restoring my whole drive in the event of main drive failure. by keeping layers going back a week or two, I also have the option of restoring to an earlier time (maybe desirable if there was something deeply screwed up in the system configuration) --- The directories included in this archive would be everything on the system drive.

- back up important user documents that change frequently, especially those are part of projects which can benefit from access to old layers. this would benefit from a rolling merge strategy that keeps layers going back quite a long time. --- The directories included would be everything in my home tree with the *exclusion* of Downloads.

It would be nice to achieve these requirements with one archive, in order to avoid overlapping backups of data in the User tree. However, with the combination of different merge strategies, and the fact that Downloads is excluded from one but not the other, I'm pretty sure this is going to require two archives. Is that correct?

James, as an aside, regarding the problem I reported, I am not trying to accomplish that task any more, and rather am experimenting with a new backup drive and setting up some backup along the lines I describe above. So there is no rush. If you discover something deeply broken, however, let me know.

Mike M wrote:Is that correct?

Basically, yes.

The need to keep different histories for your system and user documents means you need two archives. Whether these archives contain overlapping data is up to you, and your needs.

Create a "System" archive:

Capture your startup volume once a day

Keep the past 14 days

Excludes the contents of your home folder(s) (optional)

Create a "User" archive:

Capture your home folder(s) every two hours or so

Create additional actions to capture important items the moment they change or are safe to capture (optional)

Keep the past week of hourly changes, then keep daily or weekly snapshots going back as far as you desire

Exclude the ~/Downloads (and any other extraneous) folders

If you exclude the contents of your home folder from the "System" archive, then you won't have any duplicate effort. The drawback is that a full system restore will become a two-step process; you'll first have to restore your startup volume (from "System") and then restore the latest user folder (from "User").

James, as an aside, regarding the problem I reported, I am not trying to accomplish that task any more, and rather am experimenting with a new backup drive and setting up some backup along the lines I describe above. So there is no rush. If you discover something deeply broken, however, let me know.

The only real "problem" I saw had to do with your launch services database, which I suggest you reset. Not only will it make QRecall's job easier, but it will avoid random crashes in other apps too.

Thanks, James.

I have one other question. This may be involved, and it's not high priority, so just give me a slice of info for now.

I have sometimes wanted to delete large, old files from an archive. For instance I now have an archive that was capturing my system drive, call it "system.quanta", and I didn't realize it was capturing very large, constantly arriving new files in Downloads. So although my system drive has only 300 GB of stuff on it currently, this archive grew to 1.4 TB.

I tried merging some of the old layers, and got it down to 1.2 TB. I don't merge any more layers for fear of losing history I might need for important files.

So is there a command line tool that can delete individual files or groups of files according to a condition? For instance, what if I deleted everything in Downloads that was "older than X" or "larger file size than Y"?

If this is possible, this may come in handy in the future, because I download a ton of large, always-changing, always-new files, and try as I might to have a system to keep them out of the archive, sometimes I can't follow an exact procedure and then end up in the archive. It won't do any harm in the short term, but the ability to prune as necessary would be great.

Mike

You can't remove specific revisions of an item, but you can delete all revisions of an item.

In your Downloads example, you started off capturing items in your download and then decided to exclude that folder from your archive. But the earlier layers still contain the item originally captured when that folder wasn't excluded.

Open the archive, rewind until you find a captured instance of the Downloads folder (or turn on Show Deleted Items). Select the folder (or its contents) and choose Archive ➤ Delete Items…. QRecall will remove every instance of those items from your archive, as if they had never been captured. And since they are now excluded from the archive, they won't be recaptured.

If you delete a lot of data, follow up with the Archive ➤ Compact command to recover the unused space.

I've considered making a variant of the delete items command that would act on a range of layers, but that gets really complicated (due to QRecall's cross-integrity checks and the way it structures directory deltas) and there simply hasn't been enough demand.