A compact action compacts and optimizes an archive.

The chores performed by the compact action are the same as the compact command in the QRecall application, but differs from the interactive command in one respect: the archive data will only be compacted if the amount of free space that can be recovered exceeds 12% of the size of the archive. This ratio can be changed; see the Compact Free Space Ratio Minimum advanced setting.

This prevents a regularly scheduled compact actions from wasting time moving around vast amounts of data to recover a small amount of free space. Consequently, most regularly scheduled compact actions will run very quickly, until some significant amount of the archive space can be recovered.