I want to save my SSD from unnecessary write-cycles.
Is there a way to configure Xcode to put temp files to the specified directory on the external drive?
I have the same question about Unity3d and Photoshop.
Is there any general option to configure cache\temporary data location for all soft?
Not sure what temporary data you mean, however you can configure a fair amount of the locations in Xcode.
I configure this specifically to use my ~/tmp folder, where I can see what it's produced, in order to clean-up Derived Data or copy products from the Archive folder, rather than rummage around ~/Library/Application Support/, or wherever the default location is:
Related
I’m designing a custom file format. It will be either a monolith file or a folder with smaller files. It’s a rather large file in total and there is no need to load everything into memory at once. It would make it also slower than necessary. One of the file(s) may or may not be database file. Running SQL queries would be useful.
The user can have many such files. The user might want to share files with others even if it takes some time to up/download it.
Conceptually I run into issues with shared network folders, Dropbox, iCloud, etc. Such services can lead to sync issues if the file is not loaded entirely in memory or the database file can get corrupted.
One solution is to prohibit storing the file on such services. Either by using a user/library folder or forcing the user to pick a local folder.
Using a folder in library means recreating a file navigation system like Finder. It limits the choice of the user as well in where the files end up. Limiting the location to a local folder seems the better choice.
Is there a way to programmatically detect if a folder is local?
I'm creating a macOS FileProviderExtension for the remote Document Storage System (kind of like GoogleDrive), where it is possible to share a single document with multiple folders.
For example, Document1.pdf can simultaneously exist in Folder A and Folder B because it's shared with both folders. In my FileProvider extension, this would mean that file should be accessible in both folders:
Folder A/Document1.pdf
Folder B/Document1.pdf
But the file provider extension will treat those as two completely separate files. I.e., if you download one of them, and then try to open the other one, it will redownload the other one, effectively doubling the used space on user's disk and consuming network connection.
I'm looking for a way to tell the FileProviderItem what is the backing data for the given file, and thus solve problems such as:
If user downloads a file in one location, ideally I would tell the FileProvider extension that the same document in all the other locations is also now downloaded (cloud icon should disappear from all files).
Some approaches I considered:
I thought of using symbolic links as part of solution, but I don't really think that's possible
When user tries to open non-downloaded file, fetchContents(for itemIdentifier) callback is invoked. Once file is downloaded, I would ideally now notify all the other files of the same document that they are downloaded, i.e. by updating the isDownloaded property in NSFileProviderItem, but that doesn't seem to work. Also, even if I do that, I still can't say to file, what his backing data file should be.
By turning off the Sandbox capability, I guess I could, when user tries to download/open the file which has already been downloaded in other location, immediately report that file has been downloaded and provide the copy of already downloaded file as data for the requested file, but there are two drawbacks here:
3.1. I would have to turn off the Sandbox capability because I want to access the file in FileProvider path directly
3.2 System would still use disk space for each file. So, if I have same document in multiple folders, extension would keep all those copies in the system, without the option to tell it that for all those files, there is same backing data file somewhere in extension's Container.
Our application collects data from an external device. This data primarily resides in memory, but is spooled to disk in temporary files until the user explicitly saves the data. This is to provide some recovery chance if the application crashes for some reason. Generally speaking, it works just fine.
Lately we've discovered, thanks to Windows becoming more forceful about automatic updates, that these files get deleted automatically during a reboot. So if Windows kills our application to automatically apply updates, the temporary files that would have allowed recovery are gone after the reboot.
I've tested the issue by killing the application on purpose and rebooting; indeed, the temporary files have vanished after the reboot.
The files are created using the Win32 API call GetTempFileName, along with GetTempPath. Everything I've read on the subject says these files are not automatically deleted ever, but they clearly are being deleted.
What can I do to stop this? Or should I just change where our safety data is stored?
What you are seeing is a new "Storage Sense" feature added in Windows 10.
How to Clear Temporary Files Automatically in Windows 10.
Windows 10 got the ability to clear temporary files automatically in a recent build. Starting with build 15014, a new option appeared in Settings.
When enabled, it can be set to clear items like temporary files, Recycle Bin, etc. You can turn them off individually.
Alternatively, another option would be to change your app to save its temporary files in a non-system temp folder that you control, rather than using GetTempPath(). And maybe also use something other than GetTempFileName() to create your temporary file names (like using date/times or guids instead), so Windows can't possibly track the temporary files you create. Then perhaps your files won't be deleted automatically by Storage Sense anymore.
The best solution IMO is not using the temporary folder which contains (as the name suggests) temporary files that can be deleted without any consequences.
Instead you should store them somewhere in the LocalAppdata folder.
Use SHGetFolderPath function to retrieve the actual location of the LocalAppData folder.
In LocalAppData create a folder whose name is that of your company and/or product name or some combination of both and store all your pseudo temporary files there.
For an application I would like to store a collection of files together, and have them appear in the filesystem as a single file so its easy to manage. I am currently storing everything in a folder.
I would like to keep things accessible so you can manually edit the inside contents if neccesary.
One way to do this would be to create a zip archive and give it a custom extension other then .zip. Then it appears as a filetype and if needed you can unpack and access the content, but for normal use keep it hidden.
I can't seem to find a convenient way to do this. Boost and zlib can do the compression but don't work with archives. I found libzip but I have a hard time understanding how to use it and to me it seems that it only reads/writes zip archives without doing the actual compression.
Is there a more convenient way to tackle this?
Can you call system functions for creating an archive on OSX from c++ / Carbon?
Is there another way to make a folder appear as a single file?
In OSX, you can create Document Packages (similar to application bundles) which are treated as a single file in the Finder, but are really just directories with some internal structure.
Apple does not zip these packages, but they do provide the functionality you describe and they can be created and accessed through CoreFoundation by using CFBundleRef .
From the documentation:
... The important thing to remember about creating a document package is that it is just a directory. As long as the type of the document package is registered (as described in “Registering Your Document Type”), all you have to do is create a directory with the appropriate filename extension. (The Finder uses the filename extension as its cue to treat the directory as a package.) You can create the directory (and create any files you want to put inside that directory) using the standard BSD file system routines ...
As 1st step, simple rename the folder and add the extension .bundle, e.g. Myappdir.bundle
That's will show the whole folder as one file with a lego-like bundle icon.
The next step is you must create one Info.plist file inside.
Is there any way to export or save the whole project in xcode? Or I have to manually save the project containing folder?
Thanks
I wrote a program and I want to write
it further but I want to save this
version.
You want Xcode's snapshot facility.
Simply copy the whole project folder and rename it to whatever you want. The files are stored inside one big folder, so there should be no need to export it or even save as.
I do this often to make backups.
Another alternative is to implement some sort of SCM system like Mercurial or SVN and then branching it or cloning the solution. This also gives you the ability to rollback etc if required.