In any authoring system, there comes a time to destroy that which has been created. 15~20 seconds later, there comes a time to frantically attempt to recover that which has been destroyed, because somebody goofed. A "fault tolerant" system provides a way of recovering deleted data after-the-fact.

 

Some operating systems provide things called "garbage cans" or "recycling bins" for temporarily storing deleted files, which later can be "emptied" if the final decision is to make the files go away. But these are extremely poor metaphors for purging unwanted data. Some of us have thrown physical objects into real garbage cans, only to get the same things back for Christmas a few years later, because whoever emptied the garbage thought that such things were too good to throw away, but later decided not to keep them all to themselves. So some of us have learned that if we really don't want to see things again, we don't throw them into garbage cans or recycling bins. Rather, we throw them into wood chippers. This reclaims the natural organic value of the material, while guaranteeing that we won't ever get them back as Christmas presents. So in QDL, the data purge and disk space reclamation mechanism is called The Chipper.

 

If you cut a link from somewhere in QDL, if that was the last link anywhere in QDL to the post in question, the post will now show up in the folder. You should check this from time to time, to see if you haven't orphaned some posts that you actually want in the hierarchy somewhere.

 

If you delete a post, it will show up in the folder. From there it can be purged.

• Click the Action Menu icon (), and select the Purge Post option ().

This moves the post into the folder. Once there, it will get scrubbed squeaky clean, double-checked for cleanliness, and then over-written the next time you or anybody else creates a new post.

 

Posts can be recovered from the or folders by simply copying the link, and pasting it somewhere else in the hierarchy (such as your Sandbox). Posts will last forever in the folder, until you click the Purge Post(s) option, but items in the folder will disappear as new posts are created. So if you have to recover something from there, don't hesitate.

 

The Chipper folders are system-generated, and therefore cannot be edited, meaning that you don't have access to the Properties dialog box. The one thing that you might want to change is the sort order, so here, you can set that for each of the folders.

 

[registered users only]