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Restarting ArchiveMind safely

A clean quit-and-reopen resolves a surprising number of problems and never puts your data at risk. "Safely" means letting ArchiveMind stop itself rather than killing its process.

The normal way

  1. Click Quit ArchiveMind in the top-right corner of the page and confirm. (The confirmation reminds you that scans or jobs in progress will stop — that is safe: your original files are only ever read, and everything already catalogued is kept.)
  2. Wait for the page to say ArchiveMind has stopped, then close the window.
  3. Open ArchiveMind again as usual.

Closing the window is not quitting

Closing the window or tab leaves the app running in the background. If you then start ArchiveMind again, the launcher detects the running copy and reuses it rather than starting a second one — so you may reconnect to exactly the state you were trying to restart away from. Quit first, then reopen.

If the page is unreachable

When you cannot reach the interface to click Quit:

  • macOS: open Activity Monitor (Applications → Utilities), find ArchiveMind, and quit it (choose ordinary Quit before Force Quit).
  • Windows: open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), find ArchiveMind under Processes, and choose End task.

Then start ArchiveMind again normally.

For developers running from source

A server started in a terminal (./start.sh or python -m archivemind launch) runs in that terminal's foreground — press Ctrl-C there to stop it cleanly.

What a restart does not do

  • It does not delete or reset your catalogue.
  • It does not rescan anything by itself.
  • It does not touch your original files.