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travisl84480184
Participant
January 6, 2018
Question

Scratch Disks are full

  • January 6, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 1331 views

I'm assuming this is common. I did all my look up. I transferred all my stuff to my flash drive in order to free up some space on my computer. I opened up PS and still message. Is there way to fix this problem, or do I have to get another computer with much bigger storage space for PS? If anyone can help me that'll be nice.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    3 replies

    L
    Lumigraphics
    Legend
    December 27, 2018

    If you only have your internal drive and its full, you are at risk of losing all of your files. Your computer is also going to perform poorly because the operating system needs free space to work.

    You need to buy at least one external hard drive and plug it in. *Move* anything that you don't need backed up and *make a copy* of anything that you don't want to lose to the external hard drive. That will free up space on your internal drive.

    You can get a quite large USB drive for US$100 or less. For the Mac, you want it formatted "HFS Extended"; many drives come formatted "ExFAT" which is designed for Windows. Disk Utility can handle that job.

    Once you have the new drive plugged in, launch Photoshop and in the preferences you can select a new scratch disk.

    You may want to consider offsite/cloud backup as well as an external hard drive. Losing your files would probably be much worse than a Photoshop error message.

      T
      Test Screen Name
      Legend
      December 27, 2018

      Have you added a suitable new disk rjamains? How is it connected and formatted?

      Benjamin Root
      Benjamin Root
      Legend
      January 6, 2018

      How much free space do you have on your computer‘s C drive?  Do you have any empty drives you could set as secondary scratch?  Have you done a disk cleanup lately? You can change your scratch disks at start up by holding Ctrl and Alt (Cmd and Opt) and launching the program.

      M
      maddys45471043
      Participant
      January 6, 2018

      How do you add another scratch disk to photoshop? I only have one, my Mac, and its full. I've tried to clear files but it still says it's full.

      T
      Test Screen Name
      Legend
      January 6, 2018

      You buy a suitable disk (most are not) and plug it in. But you really need to first start with actual numbers.  How much space is on your disk before you start Photoshop? How big are your files in pixels, bit depth, layers? How much did you clear? How big is the disk? To crack this you need to take control of the numbers.

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