Settings & app behavior
IngestDeck keeps preferences deliberately small — most decisions belong to jobs and nodes, not to a settings maze. This page covers the whole Settings window (⌘,) and the app-wide behaviors that protect a running offload.
The Settings window
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Appearance | System / Light / Dark. System follows macOS; the whole design system re-skins live. |
| Default duplicate policy | What newly created Advanced Copy/Convert nodes start with when files already exist at the destination (factory default: New run folder). Changing it affects new nodes only — existing ones keep their setting, and Simple mode is unaffected: it always resolves collisions by renaming, never overwriting. The full policy table is in the reference. |
| Computer name | How this Mac announces itself to the iOS monitor — useful when three carts each run IngestDeck and your phone shows all of them. Defaults to the system hostname; a reset button restores it. |
| Reports | Opens the PDF report builder window. |
| Storage | Shows the size of the thumbnail cache (previews in results tables) with a Clear cache button. Clearing never touches your media or run history. |
| Usage analytics | Strictly opt-in (a first-launch prompt asks once; "Not now" keeps it off). When on, IngestDeck sends anonymous feature-usage events — which mode ran, which node kinds a graph used — never file names, paths, disk names or e-mail. Toggle it here any time. |
The activity log, in depth
The collapsible bottom panel (see the workspace tour) is backed by real per-session log files. What that means practically:
- Verbose where it counts. Disk, copy, convert, verify, format, mount/unmount and run events log intent, start, success/failure, file counts, byte counts and paths — enough to reconstruct exactly what happened after the fact.
- Sessions are files. Every launch writes its own timestamped log; Older logs reopens any previous session.
- Exportable. Save a session as JSON — attach it to a support mail or archive it with the production's paperwork.
- Errors keep their detail here. Toasts stay short and human; the log holds the raw error, the path, the disk. If a toast said "copy failed", the log says why.
Behaviors that protect a run
Sleep prevention
While any run is active, IngestDeck holds off idle system sleep — a 4 TB overnight offload won't stall because nobody moved the mouse. The display may still sleep (it's harmless), and a deliberate Apple-menu Sleep is respected. Acquire/release is logged.
Quit protection
⌘Q or closing the window during an active run asks first: cancel (keep running) or stop & quit (graceful stop — copied files stay, the partial file is removed, the run archives as stopped). When idle, quitting is instant — no nagging.
Dock progress
The Dock icon carries a live progress overlay during runs — glance from any Space.
Crash reporting
If the app ever crashes, a crash report with recent activity-log breadcrumbs (operational events, never media contents) is sent so the bug gets fixed. This is separate from the opt-in usage analytics above. To object, contact info@ingestdeck.com; the privacy policy has the details.