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Pausing Recording and Uploads

Sometimes you want Omnodex to look away: a personal errand in the same terminal, a client’s repository you should not upload from, a demo. Two commands cover this on the machine itself, and you choose how much stops.

CommandRecorded on this machineShown in the local dashboardUploaded to the hosted dashboard
omnodex record pauseNoNoNo
omnodex sync pauseYesYesNo, not even after you resume

Use record pause when nothing should be kept at all. Use sync pause when you still want the local record but it must never leave the machine.

Both apply to one Omnodex home on one machine. To refuse a stream’s uploads from the dashboard instead, without touching the machine, the stream’s owner can pause receiving.

Pausing

Section titled “Pausing”
Terminal window
omnodex record pause 1h      # for an hour
omnodex sync pause 2d        # for two days
omnodex record pause         # until you resume

Durations look like 90s, 30m, 1h, 2d or 1h30m, up to 30 days. Without one, the pause lasts until you resume it. Either way the command says what it is about to do and asks you to type pause to confirm.

Resuming

Section titled “Resuming”
Terminal window
omnodex record resume
omnodex sync resume

A pause with a duration ends by itself. After sync resume, new events upload again. Events recorded during the pause stay on the machine for good: they are marked local-only when they are recorded, and no later sync uploads them.

Checking

Section titled “Checking”
Terminal window
omnodex status

shows each switch, and how long a timed pause has left:

[status] recording:    on
[status] uploads:      paused until 2026-10-14T09:00:00Z (1d 20h left): events are still captured and shown in the local dashboard, but stay on this machine and will not be uploaded, even after you resume

omnodex record status and omnodex sync status show one switch each.

The gap on the dashboard

Section titled “The gap on the dashboard”

Each pause writes a start marker and an end marker, such as Recording paused 14:02 to 14:40 on Work Laptop. They carry no captured content, so they are kept and uploaded even under record pause. Both dashboards show them as events in the timeline. Without them, a pause would look the same as lost data.

The hosted dashboard does not need to be open during the pause: markers go up with the machine’s next sync and appear in the right place afterwards.

Agents cannot pause Omnodex

Section titled “Agents cannot pause Omnodex”

Pausing turns Omnodex off, so only a person can do it. The pause commands need an interactive terminal and the typed confirmation, which an agent’s shell tool cannot supply. Agents asked to run them get an explanation instead, and Omnodex raises a self-protection alert when an agent tries to run them or to edit the pause state file.

Agents connected through the Omnodex MCP server can read whether recording or uploads are paused (omnodex_status) and can resume them (omnodex_resume), since resuming only turns capture back on. There is no tool to pause.

Pausing and guardrails

Section titled “Pausing and guardrails”

A recording pause does not switch guardrails off. Calls are still checked and can still be stopped; the pause only keeps them out of the record.

Where the state lives

Section titled “Where the state lives”

The current pauses are kept in pause-state.json in your Omnodex home (~/.omnodex by default). Use resume rather than deleting the file, so the end of the pause is recorded and the dashboard shows where the gap stopped.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”