Sit it down quietly in a dark corner and throw a blanket over it. It won’t bother you and it doesn’t eat anything. You won’t even know it’s there.
But – if at some time in the future you need it, perhaps when your new baby is giving you a hard time, just whip off the blanket and it will wake up bright-eyed and bushy tailed and, as ever, willing to help.
😉
Actually, it does eat something. I do backups to DVD, which is a rather slow process. Removing a few hundred unneeded megabytes can make writing and verifying those DVDs a little less onerous.
So Chris, I take it your computer’s hard disk contains a collection of old Photoshop versions, all with tasteful blankets thrown over them?
Tasteful? Heck NO! Tartan. Winnie the Pooh. Star Wars. They’re all there.
Removing a few hundred unneeded megabytes can…
Actually Ted, it shouldn’t make any difference at all to writing data backups. Could it perhaps be, your HD is almost full? If that’s the case, it’s time to splash out on a big new shiny one.
If a drive is more than 80% full it will slow your system down and even cause it to crash. Space is needed for the many TEMP files created by the OS and programs as they run. The Windows paging file (Virtual Memory), for instance, requires up to 4GB.
Regular Defragging is also essential for things to run smooth and this cannot be carried out on a disk with less than 15% free space.
Best of luck with it all.
Chris.
My hard disk is 30% full and I defrag it regularly. I have no complaints about performance. But DVD burning is still a slow process, so I try to remove unused stuff from my disk to make backups less arduous.
I have a new red tartan blanket for CS2 and Bridge 1.
Ah! I misunderstood. I thought you were referring to Back-ups of your data files.
If you are backing up the entire HD to DVDs, you might want to consider something on the lines of Norton Ghost. I use it to copy the entire contents of my system/program drive to a ghost image (one large file) onto a second hard disk. The file is highly compressed and can be set up to span several DVDs. It is a fairly quick and painless procedure and restoring after a crash is a breeze.
My Data files are mirrored onto an external (firewire) drive using a program called Mirror Folder. This updates the external every two hours with any new or changed files.
There are so many ways of backing up and what works for one may not suit another.
Chris.
To back up my C: partition I use something similar, Terabyte Image for DOS. It’s a little gem of un-bloated code, about 300K that leaves plenty of room on a bootable floppy disk. Yet it can read NTFS partitions and write a compressed bootable image with spanning on any ATAPI or USB DVD burner, and verify the image afterwards. There’s also a Windows utility that can (very very slowly) extract individual files from an image file, which can be quite handy when all else fails. It’s all quite amazing, but still subject to the inherent slowness of DVD writing.
I have a second hard disk that has a small partition dedicated to Photoshop’s scratch file and a large partition that duplicates my most recent photo files before I archive them to a set of DVDs.
