Fistly: QRecall looks pretty much like the smartest backup solution I have seen sofar. And have tried many. Win and Mac. So hats off!!

After about two weeks of nightly backups without any hitch whatsoever (om my Fast-USB-drive, 500 Gigs, with 400 gigs free space and a backup size of 57 Gigs, QRecall is busy "locating free space". Is this normal behaviour?

Whoops! It seems to be finished and is backing up again ...

Jaap van Ees wrote:Is this normal behaviour?

This is normal.

After a merge or layer delete, the next capture or compact action begins by going through the archive to find any quanta that no longer belongs to an item. It marks these quanta as "unused." The capture action will then reuse the space occupied by the orphaned quanta. The compact action will remove them entirely.

Thanks!!

James Bucanek wrote:

Jaap van Ees wrote:Is this normal behaviour?

This is normal.

After a merge or layer delete, the next capture or compact action begins by going through the archive to find any quanta that no longer belongs to an item. It marks these quanta as "unused." The capture action will then reuse the space occupied by the orphaned quanta. The compact action will remove them entirely.

How long can this take, after a merge action in which no layer were found to merge?

I have a very new archive because I just started evaluating QRecall a couple of days ago. I'm trying to back up 2 systems to the archive-- the one that the backup drive is connected to (Mac A), and another one which mounts the backup drive over the network (Mac B). Mac A backed up to the archive, and did a scheduled merge action, but of course there were no layers to merge yet. Mac B failed to run anything at night because it was logged out, so I'm trying to manually run the capture now. But it's been on "Locating unused space" for over 37 minutes now. Granted it's going to be a little slow using the drive over the network, but what could it be doing??? Should I just quit it and try again? How long should I let it go on like that? Using Version 1.0.1 (1.0.1.9), btw.

EDIT: Happy to report now that somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour after running the action, it is now actively backing up files. So, we're having some progress here.

Alexandra Morgan wrote:How long can this take, after a merge action in which no layer were found to merge?

How long it will take to locate the unused space in an archive depends on a host of factors too complex to give any simple answer.

The fact the QRecall went looking for free space after a merge action that didn't actually merge anything sounds like a bug that I'll look into. It won't cause any problems, but is clearly unnecessary.

If your network is rather slow and your archive contains a lot of files (the primary factor in now long the free space collection takes), you may want to schedule your merge actions so they happen only occasionally (like once a week). This will minimize the amount of time reclaiming free space.