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scrod / nv

Notational Velocity: modeless, mouseless Mac OS X note-taking application
http://notational.net
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Never unmounts hidden RAM disk when closing NV #232

Open sarafen opened 13 years ago

sarafen commented 13 years ago

"When Notational Velocity is set to store notes in an encrypted database, it will mount a 2MB hidden RAM disk named "NVProtectedEditingSpace". This allows notes to be opened in external editors such as BBEdit, TextMate, or WriteRoom, without writing them to disk in clear text"

After activating encrypted notes storage the above happens as expected. However, when you quit NV the RAM disk doesn't unmount, it stays mounted. This is an issue as once you shutdown your mac after running NV it sits and spins forever while it unmounts the drive and then finally shuts down.

If I turn my mac on, and never run NV, then shut it down. It takes 5 secs or less. If I run NV and then shut-down it sits and spins for all of 30-40s before shutting down.

I realize this is a minor inconvenience, but it seems to me that NV should unmount the drive when the program is quit each time instead of leaving it mounted indefinitely.

scrod commented 13 years ago

Unfortunately it is just about impossible to unmount or "eject" a hidden RAM disk once it is mounted.

sarafen commented 13 years ago

That is unfortunate.

OS X dev is by no mean my forte, so pardon me if this sounds utterly stupid. If my mac is having to manually unmount the drive before shutting down, wouldn't that indicate there is at least a way being employed by the system to unmount the drive that perhaps could be used to do so from within the App upon quitting. Or is that just crazy talk?

scrod commented 13 years ago

I've tried just about every combination short of a kernel extension. If you can find a way to do it, then I can see about adding it to NV.

I should also mention that you can disable this behavior in NV with the following Terminal command:

defaults write net.notational.velocity UseInsecureTempEditing -bool TRUE

Keep in mind that this will cause temporary files to be written to disk in clear text when using the "Edit with" command.

sdudley commented 11 years ago

On OS X 10.8.4, a simple "umount /private/var/folders/xxxxxxxxx/T/NVProtectedEditingSpace" seems to unmount it for me. I admittedly didn't try to shut down afterward, but the mount has disappeared.

haltlos commented 10 years ago

I once added NVProtectedEditingSpace as an item to exclude from Time Machine backups. I don't remember why I did that. The Notational Data folder gets included in backups, so why bother about the hidden disk? Should I? Also, Disk Utility lists a "disk3" without any information about it. Could this be the NVProtectedEditingSpace? OS X 10.5.8.

haltlos commented 10 years ago

Answering my own question: yes, disk3 represents NVProtectedEditingSpace, as I found in the daily.out log file. And: there is no need to exclude it from Time Machine backups.