Hi, all.

Occasionally, I’ll find something that I figure might be of interest to others here. Many of you may already be familiar, but others perhaps not.

I downloaded an app yesterday called WinDirStat (https://windirstat.net) which gives a pretty detailed analysis of where your computer’s storage is being used. It took about an hour to run, and it revealed where the biggest storage users are… from the highest directories down to the individual files. For me, it was enlightening.

Here’s the bit concerning Xara’s software. As you know, you can set the programs to do automatic backups as you work. It will store as many as you indicate, starting anew with each file name. I won’t go too deeply into how I organize my work. Essentially, I save the project under a new name each time I reach a “milestone”, i.e., a point I want to be able to go back to if the continued work goes awry. For example, English01.web, English02.web, etc. As would be expected, each time I use a new name, the automatic backups for the old name stay in existence on the hard drive and the count starts again using the new name. I also delay optimizing images until I’m fairly sure they are how I will keep them in the final project. That can lead to very large Xara files (up to a half a GB),and consequently, very large automatic backup files.

So, when I ran WinDirStat, I was shocked to find how much storage the backups were using. Knowing that the versions I had manually saved were intact and sufficient, I carefully deleted all of the backups but the most recent (all versions of WDP and PG&D, 17, 16, etc.). The total diskspace being used went from 649GB to 488GB… a quarter of what was occupying my hard drive!

Incidentally, my full virus scan had gone from taking about five hours to about eight over the past year. I had not idea why. Until now.

So, for anyone who is interested in investigating their own computer with the WinDirStat app… and for anyone who thinks Xara backups might be hogging storage, I encourage you to check this out.