* Space saving

[Johnr65]

I'm trying to save space on the FH file and backups. Does using capital letters take up more space than small letters? Presumably, having text on 1 line rather than 2 would save space?

[mjashby]

No, a character is a character. and eliminating single characters has such a minute effect on user space that you would never notice any significant change. Just type a lengthy text note into your FH Data file and see how little the difference is in file size. You could, of course, limit the number of backups you keep, or move some to an external drive.

Mervyn

[tatewise]

The space taken up by text is minuscule compared with the space of images.

Take the Family Historian Sample Project for instance.
Its GEDCOM file which is all text is about 100 KB
Its Media folder image contents is about 10 MB = 10,000 KB which is 100 times larger.
Each image is very roughly the same size as the GEDCOM file.

So if you want to save space look through the images and reduce the resolution of the largest ones.

Also deleting obsolete Backup files will save space as they each contain all those images.

However, disk space is so cheap these days that you could buy extra storage very economically.

Alternatively, keep some of your files offline in cloud storage.

One small correction to Mevyn's statement that "a character is a character".
That is true for the most popular characters found on a keyboard such as A-Z a-z 0-9 and about 30 symbols.
But foreign accented characters and asian languages and exotic symbols in Unicode can be 2 or 3 times larger.

[Johnr65]

Thank you both, I do have a portable hard drive and only keep 2 recent backups on it as well as Google Drive which has the project.

[dewilkinson]

I concur that the largest space consumers in FH are images. Modern digital images, photos, scans etc. are often several Mb in size which enables them to be printed in a large format without loss of definition. For images in FH screens, diagrams, reports etc. you only need small images 0.1Mb or thereabouts for faces, but for documents with small text the images files will need to be larger for the text to remain clear. I often reduce images to <25% of their original size and save more than 90% of disk space with consequent improvements in backup and copy speeds. For important images that I need to keep in a large format I keep outside the FH media folder and just have a smaller version there. For census and similar documents I find the Windows Snipping tool very handy in saving space, I expand the document on screen to show what I want to see then snip and save it.

[Peter45]

I recently saved space by only connecting images rather than copying images. I keep everything on my cloud account and when images were copied it meant there were two or more copies of each image. I used find and replace to quickly change from copy to connect.
Peter

[tatewise]

Welcome to the FHUG Peter.
There are a few caveats when keeping Media files outside the Project folder:

1. The FH File > Backup/Restore > Medium/Full Backup ZIP files do NOT include any Media files.
   So you must take care to back up those Media files separately (as you do on OneDrive).
2. Migrating/synchronising Projects from one PC to another PC risks breaking the Media record File Link paths.
   That is because absolute paths are used, whereas internal files use a relative path to the Project folder.
3. Some Plugins that help with managing Media only work on files inside the Project.

When you copy Media files into the Project they have not vanished into a black hole.
They are in a standard Windows folder within the Project folder structure and can be organised into subfolders, etc.
The original file outside the Project can be deleted unless you have some special need to use it outside FH.
In fact some users never create the Media files outside the Project but download them directly into the Project internal Media folder and add them from there.

[Peter45]

Thanks Mike. I am aware of the limitations but find it easier keeping everything on the cloud even if I have to change the path on a new computer. Since finding fhug i have learnt a lot even though I have used it for years.
Thanks again
Peter