Giant .tmp files Topic is solved

[dorbs]

Hi. Im working on a project, which seems to create giant .tmp files. Are they safe to delete? they seem to be really heave, 20gb each. Thanks!

[slowtiger]

Usually they should get deleted automativally after closing the project or quitting TVP.

[dorbs]

so are they safe to delete? they start taking up all of my ssd space

[Paul Fierlinger]

I am familiar with the issue because I also save 20 of these for every project I'm working on. The question becomes, how long do I want to hold on to each one of these. In my experience, I often resort to these backups when I mess up something while working on my current project. It happens that at times I need to go back even several days to pull something that will save me from having to redraw something all over again.

So in my experience I have never had to search for anything above a month worth of work, therefore I occasionally do a cleanup and delete all the ones older than a month maybe older than 2 months to be on the really safe side. By the way, the answer to your question is, no, nothing will happen to your current work by deleting any of these, but that defeats their purpose as backups. NEVER, EVER work without making backups. That's what will get you one day into trouble.

It's up to you to decide how much space you can afford to designate for backups. If the answer is not too much then you should make some more space by buying another SSD or other external drive. Another thing to keep in mind is to create your backups on an EXTERNAL drive because things can go wrong with your computer too, which might leave you with no backups when you need them the most.

I just looked closer st the dates on your sample. You seem to be backing up just once a day. I strongly recommend that you set your automatic backups to 10 or 20 for a session which means that if you save after finishing just 2 or 3 frames because you want go through several 20 backup rounds in a work session. If these are TEMP files that are automatically created whenever you turn TVP off, then ST is right to say that should happen without your input. Now if you find several of these in your TEMP file they are remnants of crashes you have caused and those you should get rid of manually after a crash because they can cause crashes of themselves. In other words, if everything is going smoothly you should always have just one in that folder while you are working and NONE after you quit.

[dorbs]

Thank you for the detailed response. Those temp files are not my designated back-up files though. The backup files are stored in my project folder, as I configured it (the files with no icon and long names):

Capture.JPG (30.45 KiB) Viewed 17446 times

So, as these are the backup files (I have actually used them in a crash emergency, as you mentioned) which I obviously save exist - is there a use for the huge temp files ? (beside fast loading and other known uses of temp, cache, etc)

Thanks again, Paul. Your profile pic drawing is awesome, btw.

[Paul Fierlinger]

I don't recognize your sample so I assume you are on a MAC, true? I know nothing about MACs and it's best if you make that clear in your questions. Anything that is superfluous can be easily deleted. If it asks you if you are sure you want to do this, don't because that's being currently in use. That's what I go by. I realize that I went into great details about backing up but the reason for that is there are so many people who never backup their work and then cry for help when they loose their project. I hope this will do some good.


Thanks for liking my illustration. It's actually just a screen grab of a single frame from an animation sequence.

[dorbs]

Thanks. I just had an idea: I'll move it to my D: drive (not ssd, plenty of storage there) and see what happens. will move back to the same folder if anything goes wrong. And its PC, not a mac.

I'd love to see the full animation btw!

Thank again

[Paul Fierlinger]

The entire animation is 2hrs long; Slocum at Sea with Himself. The link is part of my signature below. There are ten teasers on the website and I have more stuff on Vimeo under my name "paul.fierlinger."

[Paul Fierlinger]

:)