Adobe Tech Support Says Never Clear Your Cache! DISAGREE!

[NoAdobe]

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 solution]

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.

[NoAdobe]

I believe their name was something like Akanabi(?)

I went to clear my cache, Captivate crashed, it would not reopen. I contacted tech support, they told me NEVER to clear the cache and that all of my files were lost. I reinstalled and everything was fine thankfully. I will never be touching the cache again.

Tech support has:

Told me never to clear my cache

Told me all my files were lost

Told me that I should never rescale a project (another useless "feature")
Told me to start over on projects I'd worked on for 3 weeks as it was the only way to fix problems

This doesn't even scratch the surface of the endless problems I've had withe Premiere and other Adobe software. Over the course of working on a film for 4 months Premier ate my files countless times (on about 5 different computers). Completely and utterly self destructed them as Premiere lay open in the background while I wasn't even touching it.

Trust me, I would love all of my problems to be caused by my own stupidity but I do not believe that they are. I wouldn't have posted that if I didn't honestly feel like it was my moral duty to warn people. I pray you never know the feeling of believing that 8 Learning Modules that you've worked on full time for 4 weeks are lost.

[Lilybiri]

@VRonnie... Sorry for the late reply, but I was in 'dreamland'. I totally understand your frustration and your willingness to warn other users and transfer the (wrong!) advice you got from Tech Support. It very rarely happens that I use my 'powers' as administrator to change the title and status of your discussion to a question to be able to post an immediate reply. This was only done because I was so worried that other users would follow your advice, which you believed to be correct, and get in much trouble. As I mentioned, when you don't clear the cache regularly that folder becomes so huge that it can 'eat' all your available space on the drive, and cause much more problems. on which I will not elaborate now.  If I was not persuaded that my answer was correct I would never have touched your thread. You may believe me, I never post an answer unless I have double-checked or learned from many years and answers on this forum that the answer is correct. It is always possible to misunderstand a question or to overlook something, and other great expert users on this forum usually will catch that (thanks).  

Your issues with Captivate must have been due to other causes, not to clearing the cache. Rod posted a link to a great blog post where he explains the ins and outs of setting up Captivate.

Thanks for being patient, I am a consultant and a trainer, know very well what it means to lose work and try to give as much advice as possible to avoid such a situation. I hope you activated the Backup functionality in the Preferences (which should be activated by default IMO) and keep working on your own system, never on files that are on a networked or external drive. Those can be use to store the files after they have been worked on, but never directly while using Captivate.

[Allen_Partridge]

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. Cache is just a folder on your computer that contains working files - think of them as temporary copies of your Captivate project 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 inside the 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 Captivate could 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

[RodWard]

Take a look at this (rather old) post about setting up your system when using Captivate:

Setting up Preferences in Adobe Captivate | Infosemantics Pty Ltd

Pay particular attention to the screenshot in the heading about setting Default Locations on your local hard drive.  The folders where you store the CPTX files you are working on and related assets should NEVER be located in the same folder as your Project Cache, and all of these folders should be on your local hard drive, never a network drive or virtual drive of any kind.

[NoAdobe]

Mods plz delete thread. I am done now. I won't be back again.