User Profile for bljacob

QRecall 1.0.1 (Mac OS X)

switched from Time Machine, Retrospect, and Synchronize! Pro  

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) [alert admin]

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Saturday, May 03 2008 @ 11:15 AM PDT

Synchronize! Pro X 6.0.1 (Mac OS X)

switching to QRecall  

As with other posters, I'm not thrilled with the software ... I bought a license several versions back; it never quite did exactly what I needed, but it was good enough. My set-up seemed simple enough: three laptops and an airport network, but for whatever reason it didn't like anything I tried. So I just used it to back up the important laptop [ mine :) ] on local removable storage. When Leopard and Time Machine were announced, I went out and got a 1TB wireless NASD, set it up in my basement, and figured my problems were solved. Yeah, brilliant: Apple got rid of 3rd party NASD 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 upgrading Synchronize! Pro. Two things: - The Synchronize! Pro license is $99 *per machine* ... you can't buy one license and backup multiple household computers. You *can* run the software on a second (but not third) machine if you use it manually, i.e. you can have a human-driven backup, but you can't have the software autonomously run at 3am every morning, on more than one computer. My guess is that the "parasiteware" described by a previous poster is monitoring that. - The latest version of Synchronize! Pro failed to talk to my NASD, 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 spent the morning looking for alternatives. I was surprised that I found one: QRecall (currently running in demo mode, but I'll almost certainly buy a license) is currently 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 NASD, 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 3 hours, 40 minutes, has transferred 8.4 GB, and I've been using the laptop to surf the web, 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. The QRecall license is $40 and lets you put the software on all machines in your household, no restrictions on use. I'm sold. (and, no, I've got no connections to any of the various software companies implicated) [alert admin]

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Saturday, May 03 2008 @ 11:03 AM PDT

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