QRecall - 1.1.0(15)

My home set-up seems simple enough: three laptops and an airport network, but for whatever reason no software has liked it very much. So for several years I just used Dantz and then Synch! Pro to back up the important laptop [ mine :) ] to local removable storage.

When Leopard and Time Machine were announced, I went out and got a 1TB wireless NAS disk, set it up in my basement, and figured my problems were solved. Yeah, brilliant: Apple got rid of 3rd party NAS support in Time Machine, so I've been using back-door tricks to make that kinda work. For the past week, even that has been failing (repeatable system panic requiring reboot on my laptop, though my wife's laptop is still chugging along fine). Also, I've never been thrilled that Time Machine won't let me configure it to backup just once per day, so I looked into alternatives.

This morning I tried the latest version of Synchronize! Pro -- it failed to talk to my NAS, just like Time Machine -- although, unlike Time Machine, it didn't cause a panic, just an error message. Thumbs up on that front. So I started looking for alternatives and ran across QRecall. It is currently running in demo mode, but I'll almost certainly buy a license -- it is backing up my 30GB user space as I type this, which is remarkable for two reasons:

1. Both Time Machine and Synchronize! Pro balked at the NAS, as mentioned. (though Finder mounts it just fine ... go figure) QRecall has had no problems yet. More importantly ...

2. When Time Machine backed up any more than a few MB of data at a time, it made my laptop completely unusable. For instance, when initialized, it did a full backup of my entire machine (~75GB), and though the backup succeeded, it took *three full days* (over 65 hours) during which I could not use the machine for anything else. Same thing for my wife's machine and my kids' machine. This is one of the reasons I wanted to configure it to run at 3am instead of every 15 minutes. In contrast, QRecall has been going for 4 hours, 6 minutes, has transferred 9.2 GB, and I've been using the laptop to surf the web (write this post), read email, edit a Pages doc, and even run a CAD program to design circuit boards (Eagle, via X11). Dude! That's more than twice the bandwidth of TIme Machine *and* it doesn't drag down the rest of the machine.

I'm sold. (and, no, I've got no connections to any of the various software companies implicated)

I've been looking for a long time for something that could replace Retrospect for backup. I've been using Retrospect forever on my own and client's computers, but never comfortably, because the application's interface is so un-Mac-like and downright convoluted and user unfriendly that I never felt secure that not only that the application was rock-solid reliable, but that when disaster struck one could be sure the initial, confusing setup had been correct (and that messages were easy to understand, whether re successful backup or errors). It's so easy to make a mistake, yet one might go months or even years before discovering it.

When I became aware about a week ago of QRecall I was skeptical. Very skeptical. I'd tried some others and while none seemed anywhere as confusing as Retrospect, most were too limited in what the could do and how they could do it, which is why I stuck with Retrospect despite my distaste for it. I kept hoping for something that was versatile, intuitive, easy to implement and easy to make recoveries, whether a single file that had never been modified, or a whole host of stuff that had many changes over time. The fact that only one reviewer had commented as of the date I downloaded QRecall and that it was still in beta, made me expect a cumbersome dog of a piece of software. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In fact it was sheer joy to set up, configure exactly the way I wanted, and to have it back up my primary hard drive incrementally in a way that was immediately transparent to inspection and where restoring a file (or several) was almost as easy as plain old vanilla drag-and-drop. The documentation is highly professional, clear and concise, and presented in a manner that makes it easy to get up to speed immediately. Shame it doesn't work on pre-Tiger OS versions, but perhaps an important enough tool to get many of my clients to justify the cost of upgrading their Macs.

I emailed the developer with a couple of suggestions (fairly trivial) and got a fast and positive response. Nirvana. QRecall appears to be a keeper.

So far, I've scarcely scratched the surface in utilizing it's full features. Hopefully, I'll keep watching here as the inevitable problems and improvements get published, and others share their experiences, positive and negative. I've rated it an overall four stars only because I want to work with a software a while before rating it any higher. Because it's a free beta now, I've not rated the price, but the projected pricing looks very attractive and I'll certainly buy it when it's out of beta.

Don Levy
The MacTherapist
Los Angeles