* Is it safe to delete very old Snapshots?

[AnneEast]

I have noticed that I have quite a long list of snapshots in my FH projects. For some strange reason there are a lot from 2016. Is it safe to delete those old ones? I would like to do so because, added together, they are quite large. I save my Projects to a free Dropbox account (and three other places as well, don't worry!) which doesn't have huge amounts of space but is fast and convenient.
Anne

[LornaCraig]

Yes, it's perfectly safe to delete old snapshots. But I'm not sure why you have a lot, or why they are so old. The FH Help says:

Also, snapshots are not kept forever. Only a maximum of 8 snapshots are stored, at any one time (with default settings); so when the maximum is reached, as new snapshots are stored, old ones are deleted. This is to ensure that the space taken up by snapshots never becomes excessive.

Do the snapshots from 2016 belong to a project which you have not worked on since then? If so they will remain there unless you delete them, but there are not likely to be more than 8 per project. Even if you adjust the default settings I think the maximum possible to be kept is 20. The exception is when you have reverted to a snapshot and a 'pre-revert' snapshot has been created:

When you revert to a snapshot, the current state of your data, prior to the reversion, is saved as a snapshot with type 'pre-revert' (unlike ordinary snapshots which havetype 'auto'). This means that, if you change your mind, you can switch back again if you need to. 'Pre-revert' snapshots are not deleted automatically. If you want to delete a pre-revert snapshot, or any other snapshot, you can do so in the Snapshot Manager. You can select multiple snapshots and delete them all in one go if you wish.

[AnneEast]

Thanks Lorna. I have no idea why they are there. I do have several Projects but have certainly used them all within the last year or so. I'll delete the old ones. Thanks
Anne

[AnneEast]

All done. I deleted 21 snapshots from one of my Projects and 42 from another! The other Projects did not have so many.
Anne

[tatewise]

Anne, please check you Tools > Preferences > General tab settings.
Click the Advanced button at the bottom and review the Auto. Snapshot Cycles (fast/slow) settings.
The default should be 5 & 3 as shown below, resulting in 8 Snapshot files per Project.
Those settings are global, so any change affects all Projects the same way.

SnapshotSettings.png (43.29 KiB) Viewed 3938 times

I wonder what happens if the name of the Project is changed?
Is it possible Anne that you have renamed any Projects?

[AnneEast]

Sorry for the delay! Mike, my settings are exactly as your image shows. I have never altered anything in there.
Also, while I do have several projects, I have never renamed any of them.

I didn't really know anything about snapshots (except through reading about how they can be used on this forum). I would never have noticed there was such a build up except that my free Dropbox account sent me a warning that it was getting close to the limit, which puzzled me. I studied the Dropbox files and noticed the long list of snapshots. I compared the size of the Family Historian Projects folder on Dropbox with that on my PC and found it was much larger. Now I have trimmed down my PC copy it is 418MB. The one on Dropbox was 1.59GB. I removed it from Dropbox and replaced it with the 418MB copy.

I think it is possible this has come about because of the way I save my FH Projects folder. I save it to Dropbox, a separate hard drive, the BT Cloud and a memory stick. My method of saving is to drag and drop (copy) the folder to each of these. The ones on the separate hard drive and the memory stick are fresh copies but the ones on the cloud I allow to overwrite. I think this then leaves behind any other 'stuff' from previous saves. However it doesn't explain why there were so many snapshots on some of my Projects on my PC.

However, all is well now and I have tested out the saved copies to check they work properly.

Anne