Compacting Progress

Hi James,

I have an action to automatically compact my QRecall archive, which is located on an external USB hard drive. It's been running for about 30 minutes as I write this. For most of that time, the progress bar in the Activity Window has been all the way at 100%, and the message underneath says "Locating unused space, moved Zero KB, recovered Zero KB"

I assume it's doing something, because the drive is a little noisy, so I can hear the heads moving, but from looking at the Activity Window, it would be easy to believe that it was frozen. There's just nothing going on there, except for the timer counting up.

Oh, wait -- it just finished. Total time about 36 minutes.

Anyway, I think you need to do something better with the progress bar in that situation. It's really confusing (or misleading) when it goes all the way to 100% and then just sits there for tens of minutes. If the "locating unused space" step is not something you can quantify in order to show progress with the bar, then how about switching to an indeterminate ("barber pole") type progress bar instead?

-- Bruce

Bruce Giles wrote:Anyway, I think you need to do something better with the progress bar in that situation. It's really confusing (or misleading) when it goes all the way to 100% and then just sits there for tens of minutes. If the "locating unused space" step is not something you can quantify in order to show progress with the bar, then how about switching to an indeterminate ("barber pole") type progress bar instead?

It's a bug. It's supposed to display an indeterminate progress indicator.

In the version that introduced the "Keep deleted items" option, a new phase was added to the compact action. After the initial archive analysis, QRecall walks through the recent layers looking for deleted items to expunge from the archive. This is associated with a progress bar that advances as each layer is processed.

What's supposed to happen next is the "Looking for unused space" phase takes over, changes that status message, and switches the progress bar to indeterminate. What really happens is that the progress bar remains at 100%, left over from the "erasing deleted items" phase.

I've fixed the code and it will eventually show up in future version of QRecall.