Adobe Tech Support Says Never Clear Your Cache! DISAGREE!

Question

This is a warning to everyone using Captivate to consider never ever clearing your cache. There have been countless reports of adobe erasing files completely unrelated to Captivate while doing this (even if you've cleared it 100 times before and it was fine). Besides that, clearing the cache can also break Captivate.

In fact, I tried to clear my cache and it did break Captivate. It wouldn't open after that. Tech support told me that all of my files were gone forever! Luckily I was able to reinstall and everything was fine. But tech support also told me to just never clear the cache ever and I understand why now.

Unfortunately, having a cache that's overflowing gives me continual "fatal errors" that crash Captivate about every hour (one of the many joys of using this delightful program). But crashing is still better than losing all files.

Moderator: do not follow this advice!

Lilybiri · Accepted Answer

I strongly disagree with this advice, based on my experience as a long-time Captivate expert, using it many hours a day. I wonder who gave you that advice, could you please post a name?

The cache fills up very quickly, grows to huge sizes, sometimes within a week. You have to clear it up, I am doing it about once a week, but I leave the cache intact for those projects I am working on that do not present any issues. As you can see in my profile I have been helping Captivate users since many years to solve their issues, and clearing the cache is one of the first advices when there are problems with CP-files.

The big problem is about changing the default path to the Captivate files (in field 'Publish at in Preferences) and the one to the cache (in the same Preferences) which have to be pointing absolutely to folders on the PC or Mac of the user, never to a folder on a networked nor external drive. Those folders have to be DIFFERENT. Only those users who mess up the paths, and choose the same folder for both end up with lost files.

Allen_Partridge · Answer

Hi Veronica,I'm sorry to hear that you are finding some frustration with the cache. Actually it's pretty rare that I hear of someone deleting their content because they deleted the cache. But let's take a look at how it all works and that might provide some better answers. I definitely would not recommend 'never' clearing your cache. It could create a massive slowdown in performance of your entire computer. Certainly the files could eventually grow large enough to slow down Captivate. In fact I recommend the opposite - clean your cache regularly.First, it is important to understand what cache is. Cacheis just a folder on your computer that contains working files - think of them as temporary copies of your Captivateproject files. Captivate uses the cached projects to make opening and closing projects, as well as saving projects - faster. That's also why you can sometimes recover a lost project file by rebuilding it from your cache.When you first install Captivate, default directories are used for the cache folder. By default on Windows for example it points to a folder like this ...If I zoom in you can see that the location of the cache folder by default is into a folder similarly named AdobeCaptivateCachedProjects. Again, it is just a folder. There is nothing magical here. It has no power to disable your existing projects - which should not be saved anywhere insidethe cache folder. Saving Captivate files inside your cache folder would be like saving your projects inside a trash can.If a user makes no changes to the location of the project cache - then this folder is created by Captivate and is meant only to store the cache for Captivate files. It is sort of like a temp file, or a trash bin. Now it is possible to put things into this folder, from your computer - if you wanted to. But it would be the digital equivalent of storing things in a trash can. You really don't want to do that. Sooner or later, someone is likely to empty the cache (take out the metaphorical trash) and everything in the folder - whether Captivate put it there, or you put it there by deliberately dropping the files into the bin, everything inside the cache folder will be deleted when you press the clear cache button.Now when you go to clear your cache, a dialog box like this will pop open asking if you really want to flush all of the files in that cache folder. If in doubt, then don't do it. Before you do it - you would be wise to ensure that you don't currently have any project files open. That's because deleting cache files of a project while that project is open inside of Captivatecould create problems for that open project. Best practice would be to first close all open Captivate Projects, verify that the cache directory is correct, and ensure that you haven't accidentally placed any unintended items inside the cache folder. Then go ahead and clear the cache.The other thing that could go wrong here would be if for some reason you changed the default publish directory to the cache folder. Again - that would be super crazy - like storing your favorite books in the trash can.This should result in a quiet uninterrupted removal of the cache files.Hopefully this will help clarify what cache is, where it is stored, and what steps you might want to use to ensure cleaning cache is without incident. I do recommend cleaning your cache regularly. A good time to do it is after you've finished a big project, and have made nice clean backup files of that project - and saved those files to your regular computer in a normal folder - no where near the cache folder (virtual trash bin.)--Allen