usb-6501 read counter value without resetting it

I am new to NI and have tried to find this information but couldn't locate any relevant documentation.

We have a working solution with the USB-6501 and a C# app. The C# app starts a Task, a CountEdgesChannel and a CounterSingleChannelReader, which can read the incremental count. This works great.

My question is:

1. Is the count kept in the DAQ device or in the app memory? If it's in the app memory, this would make my next question irrelevant.

2. When the app closes, it loses the count. Is there a way to read the current count from the DAQ device without resetting it? The only way we can open a channel is by setting the initialCount, which overrides any existing value.  Starting a channel without passing the initialCount would be perfect but that does not seem possible.   We figured out that, since we could pass the initial count, if we could retrieve that info, then we would be able to achieve our goal.

Here's the code we use to create the channel and reader:

Thank you