How to Stop a Long Running Process?

There was just now a problem where the root cause was between the keyboard and chair and I found I needed to kill a long running process – moving lots of files from their current Group to another.

During that emergency I found no keys or combinations to kill the “move”. I use Activity Monitor to kill the app. Then I copied my backup from earlier in the day and started again.

Is there a way to kill or otherwise interrupt an unwanted long-running activity, even if (erroneously) launched by the user?

@cgrunenberg would have the authoritative words on this but only actions that are shown in the Activity window or pane may be user-cancellable.

Yea, I thought of that, but with the “long running move process” could not bring up the Activity window. So used the macOS “Activity Monitor” to kill DEVONthink.

If practical, might be good to have a “Cancel” button on the dialog box showing the progress of the move…

Some operations, e.g. OCR, can be cancelled (and have a button in the Activity pane/panel to do so), others not, like this one. But why didn’t you just move the items back afterwards?

Didn’t occur to me. And it had a long time to go and panic set in while watching it go and go.

How do you do that? CMD-Z?

Did you move them to a different database or just to a different group? Undo/Redo is not supported across databases so far. But a future release will support the possibility to put things back, e.g. after moving/classifying/trashing, no matter whether between databases and even after restarting the app.

Multiple databases.

Would this might also include the ability to replicate across databases? Just asking…

I’m unsure how you got from the previous comment to replicating across databases. :thinking:

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No, this is a different issue and not planned (due to technical limitations, just like hard links in the filesystem are limited to one volume).

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OK. As I said, “just asking.” Obviously, may never be addressed. Thanks for otherwise great software!

key words here: “might” and “just asking”. Let me know if you’re still unsure.