Captivate2019 - cached projects folder

[Tejas Dandekar]

I am using Captivate 2019.

What is the significance of this folder?

\Documents\Adobe Captivate Cached Projects

There are some folders/files that get created here and consume a lot of disk space. Should one retain them or delete them occassionally? Any suggestions?

[Lilybiri]

The cache is meant to speed up opening the existing project. Indeed, you need to clear the cache regularly because it takes up a lot of space. You just need a simple click in the Preferences, General settings.

[Tejas Dandekar]

Does each working project have its own cache? I tried clearing it when my source was open and the source got corrupt. Luckily I had a backup.
Is it ok to clear the cache when Captivate is closed and no source is in use? I hope opening the source the next day will not create issues.

[Lilybiri]

Yes, each project has its own cache folder. If a project is open, and you use Clear Cache (in Preferences), the cache folders of open projects will NOT be deleted. I still use the old dcache AIR application to delete caches which I want to delete. Not sure how long this will be possible in the future, but still works.

More details in this blog post:

http://blog.lilybiri.com/tips-for-troubleshooting

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

Personally, I recommend you leave the Project Cache alone and don't delete anything in there until you reach the end of a major milestone in your project, or the end of the project itself.   Once you have delivered your project and you have confirmed you have perfectly good working final version CPTX files stored safely in a repository, THEN you can safely delete your cache.  Thats the process I follow.

If a project happens to become corrupted for some reason, the cache files can be very useful in rescuing the content and restoring a working CPTX project file from the cache.   Additionally, you should always have backups turned on in Captivate Preferences.  And for another layer of projection, I even do an immediate Save As each day when I open my CPTX project file and append the current date to the end of the filename in reverse order (e.g. 2021-11-10 for today).  That means I have at least three ways to get back a working file if something happens to go wrong with it.  In practice this might happen to me once every few years because I never take risks and only work on local files, not over any kind of network connection.  But I like to play safe.

However, as Lieve has mentioned, the name of each cache folder is of no help whatsoever in determining which particular project file that cache folder relates to.  That's why the dcache AIR app is handy. It can tell you which folders relate to which projects.