Photoshop is eating all my hard drive space, even though I'm using cloud.

[markwm]

I'm saving all my docs on the cloud but PS is still destroying my hard drive space.

I've been working on 1 document all day and at one point I deleted 15GB of files on my drive to make space, less than 2 hours later I was back to getting a no disk space warning despite not saving a single thing to the hard drive. 

what to do? 

[Bob_Hallam]

Photoshop needs about 6x the working file size for scratch space that the software uses to perform it's operations.  Frustrating as it is there is no better way to do this.  I suggest an external drive that you use just for Photoshops Scratch disk. I have on on my desktop computer that's 250gb and it's selected in Photoshops pref's as a scratch disk.  I do not use it to store anything and Photoshop is happy 🙂 

[markwm]

I have a 500gb EXTERNAL drive connected purely for the purpose of being a scratch disk

maybe me mistake is selecitng both drives to be the scratch disk, 

[Chuck Uebele]

Yea, I would try using just the external disk. The local disk might fill up first, the flow over to the external.

[Bob_Hallam]

What size files are you working with?  I would select the 500gb scratch disk as the primary scratch disk.  I have a small drive for the OS and it has not gotten filled up.  So I don't think that is the problem unless the files are massive. 

[JJMack]

I believe the newer version of Photoshop may have system resource management issues. When I run large  batch jobs they allocate way more machine  resources by the end of the batch processing job than prior versions of Photoshop.  Where my Batch process will never have more than three document open at a time  Newer Photoshop version  may allocate  more than 25GB of RAM and 75GB of scratch space by the end of the Batch Proces.  Photoshop CS6  processing the same batch job  allocates  less than 10GB of ram and under 20GB of scratch space. However, Photoshop 2020 will process the batch  Job faster than CS6.   Scratch space management has been re dome in Photoshop  2021 and 2022.  Where Photoshop 2020 may allocate a 75GB temp file for scratch space.  Photoshop 2021  and 2022 will allocate three 16+GB temp file and an  additional 14GB temp file for scratch space. 25GB of ANM  and 75GB of scratch space seems like over kill  for  processing three documents.  Its most likely a resource management issue.