I would like to suggest an addition to the "pause downloading if space is below 'x' " feature. The addition being to automatically abort/pause an unrar (maybe par2 repair as well?) if free space falls below a set amount. Another related suggestion, would be to verify that the queue has been successfully saved before deleting backup files. My reasoning for the inclusion of this feature is as follows.
I recently discovered that I had run out of space on the disk where I store both the alt.binz executable and the download folder. Alt.binz had crashed overnight after filling up the disk, and when I reopened it, I was somewhat dismayed to find that all of my collections on the download queue had vanished. Inside the queue folder, was only one empty file called "queue.idx". There was nothing of particular note in the log file, and for a while I was at a loss as to what had happened. I eventually constructed the following theory based on a partial extraction of an archive set and various observations about the behavior of the unrar function when it has run out of disk space.
Alt.binz finished downloading a set of archives, proceeded to par check it, and began to unrar the set. As the unrar proceeded, the free space dropped below the set limit and downloading paused. However the unrar did not pause, and continued to proceed until disk space was exhausted. My tests confirmed that the unrar does not abort when free space is depleted, it simply pauses. This behavior can be observed by letting it fill up the disk with a partial unrar, and then moving/deleting unrelated files. The unrar process will then continue as if nothing had happened.
At this point the program was effectively doing nothing, except saving the download queue every x minutes. I currently have it set to do this every 1 minute. I suspect that having zero space left on the drive prevented new saves of the queue from being created, but did not prevent the backups from being aged off. Once the backups were gone, unrar immediately continued, filling the space that should have been used for new saves of the queue. Thus eventually, there were no saves of the queue left on the hard drive. Alt.binz crashed for some miscellaneous reason, (my current OS install is somewhat unstable, so the crash itself may be unrelated to alt.binz), and the queue was wiped from memory.
I realize that this type of situation is probably uncommon, however if you have the time to spare, I would very much apreaciate the implemtation of this or a similiar feature.
Thank you for your time. -Zykr
