# Purging Adobe Bridge preview cache



## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

This is an FYI, one that I've posted about before but felt the need to talk about again, especially in light of a rather extreme example from my own recent experience.

Conducted one of my semi-regular SuperDuper incremental backups last night, main HD had a little over 1.9 million files to backup. Thought that was a bit on the high side & decided to have a look at Adobe Bridge. I'm running v5.1 & knew that it had been some time (as in several years) since I had purged the preview cache therein. We've been doing some archiving lately & handling a lot of older files in Bridge.

I opened a Show Info on the main HD just to watch the space I'd be regaining. Started out with about 306MB used. I went into Preferences>Cache & hit the Purge button & for the next 10 minutes or so listened to the HD rattle away. 

By the time Bridge was done, my HD showed 182MB used, a difference of 124MB! This morning I reran SuperDuper & there were only 880,000 files to backup, a difference of over a million! 

In addition, there's little to no delay using Bridge because it no longer had to compare new Preview versions of images against a database of over a million archived ones.

Takeaway? Purge that cache a little more often than once every 5 years, dummy. It could regain you a ton of HD space, make your software run faster & save some wear & tear on your HD.


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