Storage and background jobs
Glossa keeps data in two distinct places and runs long operations in a queue you can pause and resume.
Two folders, not one
Data folder — holds the database: records, translations, glossaries, settings. It is small and belongs on a local disk.
Vault folder — holds the images and documents downloaded from libraries. Those are gigabytes, and they can live elsewhere: another partition, an external drive, a synced folder.
Keeping them apart protects the database: wanting the images in the cloud no longer forces the database there too, where it risks corruption.
Changing folder
In Settings → Storage. Glossa opens the picker itself, not the page: the path never travels through the interface.
When you pick a folder for the vault:
- empty → the vault structure is created;
- already a Glossa vault → it is reconnected without copying anything, handy for moving a disk between two computers;
- holding something else → it is refused, so thousands of files never land in a folder picked by mistake.
Changing folder does not move files already downloaded: moving them will arrive as a background job.
If the chosen folder is unreachable — disk unplugged, share not mounted — Glossa says so and blocks vault operations. It does not treat the files as lost and downloads nothing again.
Synced folders
The vault can sit on Drive, OneDrive or iCloud, on one condition: the client must keep a real copy on disk. In online-only mode files are placeholders — they look present, with the right size, and take zero bytes. Glossa would call a source complete while nothing is there.
Never put the database in a synced folder.
The job queue
Downloads, vault checks and long generations do not block the application: they become queued jobs.
Where to see them — in the bottom bar on the right, in every section. Clicking opens the panel with the list split into running, waiting, finished today.
How to control them — pause, resume, cancel and retry per job, or for all of them at once from the controls at the top of the panel.
How they are named — every row carries the work's name while it is still waiting its turn, and adds progress and downloaded size while it runs: I diarii di Marino Sanuto · 34/374 · 46 MB. Next to it you see what it is doing right now: starting, reading the manifest, choosing the resolution, downloading. A tag says which kind of job it is — pages, check — and the numbers keep what has arrived separate from what is expected in total.
Clicking a row opens it and shows the details: the resolution the library accepted, its server address, the attempts made, the timestamps.
Pausing is not instant: the job finishes the piece it is on — the page it is downloading — saves it and stops. That is why the state goes from pausing… to paused.
A cancelled job is final: it can be repeated from scratch, not resumed. Pages already downloaded stay.
Closing and reopening
Closing Glossa with active jobs brings up a confirmation with the list. The jobs are paused, not cancelled, saving the point they reached.
On reopening no job restarts on its own: you find them stopped and decide. The only exception is optional — in Settings → Jobs you can let interrupted downloads restart automatically.
Checking the vault
Settings → Storage has two controls.
The quick check looks at whether the files Glossa registered are still in place: milliseconds even for a large manuscript. The full check opens every file, checks its shape and compares its fingerprint with the one recorded when it arrived: it is the only one that catches a file truncated by an interrupted download or gone rotten on disk. It is slow in proportion to the gigabytes, and on a synced folder it forces the service to download everything. If nothing is damaged the two counts match, and only the time differs.
Both become queued jobs: follow them from the bottom panel, pause them, cancel them. The result is a four-part count — intact, missing, corrupt, orphans — where orphans are files left in the vault that no record claims. Neither one deletes or re-downloads anything on its own.
The outcome of the last check stays in the settings, below the two commands, until you run another one: when it ran, which kind, and the four numbers. Next to the files without a work there is the command that deletes them, with a confirmation saying how many they are and how much they take. Glossa looks at the vault again the moment you press — it does not trust the earlier count — and tells you how many it really removed: between the check and the deletion a download may have finished, and those files are no longer unclaimed.
A switch runs the quick check at every startup. It is off by default: it makes opening slower on large or networked vaults.
How many jobs at once
In Settings → Jobs, one limit per resource type: downloads, processing, disk writes, language services, document generation. Automatic lets Glossa choose.
The download limit does not depend on your computer's power but on the library's server: raising it too much triggers temporary blocks.
How large the pages
In Settings → Download you choose the page size and the thumbnail size.
The page size is a target, not an exact number: Glossa asks the library for the one it declares closest, above or below. Asking for an invented size would force the service to produce it on the spot — measured: twenty-three seconds against one.
The same choice can be made on the single work, by opening its card in the Library, and there it wins: the size depends on the material — a wide-set printed book reads at far less than a cramped minuscule — not on who keeps the book.
Pages already downloaded stay as they are: the choice applies to what is downloaded from now on.
Thumbnails are not asked of the library: Glossa derives them from the pages it has downloaded, on your computer. Larger ones take more space and browse better; they cost no request at all.
The pace towards libraries
Every library has its own pace: how long to wait between requests, how many requests in a minute, how long to stop when it asks you to slow down, how many attempts to make. These are a few different paces applied to many libraries, so Settings → Libraries governs them as profiles.
Two profiles ship with Glossa, with values proven in the field: Normal, used by almost all of them, and Slow, tuned on Gallica, the strictest one. You can change them, create others and name each one; next to the name Glossa says how many libraries use it.
Below, the list of libraries: for each one you pick its profile from a menu. A profile someone is using cannot be deleted — move the libraries that follow it first — and the two that ship with the application cannot be deleted at all.
Requests at the same time never go above four, whatever you write: the limit depends on their server and it keeps you from being blocked.
Covers and searches kept aside
The covers you see in search results and in the Library are not requested from the library every time you look at them: Glossa keeps them aside and draws them from there. The same goes for searches — running the same search twice does not go back to the network.
This does two things. First, the covers show up: in the installed version they used to be empty boxes. Second, forty results are no longer forty requests fired at a library all at once, but requests that respect the same pauses as a download.
This material is not yours. It never counts as downloaded, it does not appear in a work's page count, it is never part of a backup, and it gets dropped when space is needed — starting with whatever has gone unread the longest. The way to keep a book is still to download it.
In Settings → Data you can see how much is used right now, choose the size limit (512 MB by default) and how long searches are worth before being run again (24 hours by default). Next to it is the command to empty it: you can do that at any time without losing anything. Images, on the other hand, never expire — the pixels of a sixteenth-century manuscript do not change — only the size limit governs them.
If you want to know whether something new has appeared in the meantime, a line above the results tells you how old what you are looking at is, and next to it a command runs the search for real, skipping what had been kept aside.
How many pages you actually have
The number you read in the Library is the files on your computer: Glossa looks at the folder, not at a list kept aside. The benefit shows when something goes wrong — an interruption, a copy made by hand, a disk unplugged and plugged back in: the count cannot tell a different story from what is there.
Pages the library does not serve do not count as missing. A manuscript may declare 328 pages and the server return twenty fewer: that is not your fault, and downloading again would not conjure them up. Glossa notes it, stops asking for them at every resume, and reads the book as complete for as much as the library serves. Every now and then — about once a week — it tries them again, because libraries do fix things.
Pages taken at full resolution are an addition, not a gap. If you wanted the larger version of three pages, the record says «plus 3 at full resolution» next to the count, instead of making the book look half-finished.
Shrinking images to free up space
A book downloaded at full resolution takes three times more room than it needs. One downloaded months ago with a higher cap than you need now holds detail you never look at. In both cases cleaning up beats downloading again, because the library does not pay the price for it.
On the work's record, in the Library, a command reads the downloaded pages again, shrinks them to the chosen size and recompresses them, replacing the original.
It is irreversible: the original is replaced. The command queues the job immediately. It works on one size at a time: the one the book was downloaded at. Pages you deliberately took at full resolution are left as they are.
On a long book it runs for minutes, so it is a job like a download: you follow it from the panel at the bottom right, and you can pause or cancel it. Pages already smaller than the chosen size are not touched, because recompressing them would lose something without freeing anything.
While it runs, the panel says how many pages it has shrunk and how much room it has freed; the value remains on the completed job. Target size and quality are chosen in Settings → Downloads.
If a page cannot be read or rewritten, the job ends in error instead of hiding it: its details keep the number of unprocessed pages, while successful pages remain safely stored.
While a download or optimisation can still change a work, commands that free its space or remove it are refused. Let the job finish or cancel it first; pausing is not enough.
The backup
Settings → Backup saves a file with everything that cannot be downloaded again: the works' records, notes, transcriptions, translations with their history, glossaries, phrase memory and the record of the work done.
It covers the whole of Glossa, not a single workspace. The file holds every workspace you have, and restoring replaces them all.
The images are not in it, on purpose. They come back from the library: a 40 GB backup is a backup nobody makes, a few-megabyte one gets made every week. The file does know which works were on your computer and at what size, and on restore Glossa offers to download them again. If you want the images safe too, the way is to keep the vault in a synced folder.
The file is compressed — the content is text, and compresses about tenfold — and carries a fingerprint: a backup interrupted while being written is recognised before the restore starts, instead of leaving you halfway with your data already cleared.
You can save a file that only Glossa opens: it prevents accidental opening but does not protect sensitive material. For sensitive data use the lock: it asks for a password and, after saving, shows a recovery code once. Keep that code outside the app: you can select it or use the copy button beside it. Either the password or code opens the encrypted backup, but losing both makes its contents unrecoverable.
Restoring replaces everything: every workspace there is now is replaced by what is in the file. The confirmation says so, and there is no going back. Closing the save dialog without choosing a file writes nothing, and Glossa does not claim to have saved.
The pages you had on your computer stay where they were. The restore keeps them, for the works the backup contains, and right after it queues a vault check to see whether those files are really there. When the check ends — even much later, or on the next launch — Glossa tells you how it went: if nothing is missing it says so, and if something is missing it offers to take back only that, at the size it had. Files left without a work are counted in the settings, with the command to remove them.
Stopped does not mean broken
A job can sit still for minutes while respecting a library's limits. The indicator then reads waiting · resumes in 8 min and the bar does not move: it is not an error, and it resumes by itself. A failed job says so differently, with the reason and the option to retry.