Combine Owners or Volumes

Combine is a special utility that combines the history of multiple owners or volumes.

An archive is organized by owners, each containing one or more volumes. In time, it's very likely that you will replace or repartition a hard drive, or upgrade to a new computer system. If you migrate all of your data to the new volume and then being capturing it to your existing archive, QRecall will create a second volume in the archive.

This is, however, probably not what you want. Your archive now has two volumes with separate and distinct histories—but it's really the same set of items. This can make it cumbersome to find items, explore their history, and recall older versions.

Automatic Volume Culling Note

You don't have to combine volumes for the old volume to eventually be removed from the archive.

The Cull uncaptured volumes archive setting will automatically remove old volumes that are no longer being captured after a period of time, unless this feature turned off for that archive.

A similar situation will occur (creating multiple owners) if you upgrade or replace your identity key.

Combining Items

This is where the combine command comes in. Combine will stitch together the history of two (or more) owners, or the history of two (or more) volumes, where those owners/volumes actually represent the same owner/volume captured at different times.

Once the combine is finished, a single owner or volume will appear in the archive, and every item it contains will have a single timeline.

Limits of combining items Note

The combine command has a number of restrictions. Some are obvious, while others are dictated by esoteric requirements of the archive structure:

If there are three or more items to combine, you should select all of the items at once and combine them using a single command; QRecall will concatenate the items in the correct order. If you do it piecemeal, it's possible to create a situation where some items are combined, but the resulting item then can't be combined with the others.
The layers in the items cannot overlap. In other words, all of the layers for an earlier owner/volume must have been captured before any of the layers captured for a later owner/volume.
When combining volumes, all of the volumes must belong to the same owner.
When combining owners, the most recent owner must be a permanent (or beta) identity key. You cannot, for example, combine two owners that were both defined by trial identity keys.
In unusual situations, it might not be possible to combine some items. This occurs because of the way layers are identified inside an archive. Combining items may require that a layer be split into two layers, and there might not be a suitable layer identifier available. If this occurs, merge the affected layer with a subsequent layer (you might need to capture a new layer), and try again.
If the archive was damaged (and later repaired), it might not be possible to combine the items.