Participating Frequently

Question

Scratch Disks photoshop

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
December 6, 2019
4 replies
5318 views

Hi there,

I've tried everything so please help!

My scratch disk is full on photoshop. I can't seem to delete the temp files on the c-drive, when I do it says the file is in use in PS, I close PS and then it says the files can't be located. WHAT CAN I DO, IT'S DRIVING ME MAD AND I HAVE A REALLY BAD HANGOVER!

Problem or error

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D Fosse

Community Expert

What you need is to clean out your user account. There's a great little utility available for Windows called WinDirStat, which shows you exactly what's filling up your drives. Here's my C drive at the moment, just for illustration:

The outlined portion is my user account. The big green at the top is the Bridge cache. You can move this to a different drive if you want. The cyan middle below is the Photoshop scratch disk - Photoshop is open here. It disappears when I close Photoshop. Then there is the ACR cache purple left, also movable - and Firefox cached files cyan right. I could just delete that.

The big red to the right are the hibernation file top, this could be disabled (poof). The smaller one is the system TEMP directory.

And so on. Lots of this could just be deleted, or moved.

The last time I did a thorough house-cleaning in my user account, I got rid of around 50GB. My 500GB system drive (in reality 476GB) at this moment has 401GB free space.

S

SJRiegel

Legend

If you need to free up some of the space while Photoshop is open (for instance, if you can't save because Scratch Disk is Full, Edit > Purge > All from the Photoshop menu may buy you enough space to make the save. If this is a recurring problem, you will need to clean up your own saved files on your hard drive to make more room.

markg23841117Author

Participating Frequently

Thanks for this.

I have tried this purge process, however all of the options are greyed out on drop down: 'Clipboard', 'Histories', and 'All' so I can't click on them. When I look into this other people are saying that this means the scratchboard has been cleared but that clearly isn't the case.

I have already said that I have tried to clear the photoshop temp files but as mentioned in my previous post it when I do it says the file is in use in PS, I close PS and then it says the files can't be located.

Any other ideas?

S

SJRiegel

Legend

Do you know why I can't delete the photoshop temp files in the c-drive?

Because when Photoshop is open it is holding them for use, so it won't allow their deletion, and when you close Photoshop, the program itself deletes them, so they no longer exist (which is why you can't find them when the Photoshop is not open).

D Fosse

Community Expert

Yes, that's Photoshop's scratch files and this is normal behavior. They are deleted on exit.

You apparently don't understand what these files are for. Photoshop needs to move a lot of data around, and there's not enough RAM no matter how much you have. So it has to be written to a portion of your disk(s), and this is the Photoshop scratch disk.

To operate Photoshop you need to have a lot of disk space available. If you don't, the application cannot run. It's as simple as that.

So - how much free space do you have?

markg23841117Author

Participating Frequently

You haven't really answered my question other than be a little patronising!

I'm aware what they do, and all the other advice I've look online suggests I delete the temp files in the c-drive which, as I said in my previous post, I can't seem to do.

I have 58 GB left.

A

Anonymous

Hi

I'll move the thread to the Photoshop forum, how much free space do you have on the C drive, do you another drive that you can use as the scratch disk, what version of Photoshop are you using

markg23841117Author

Participating Frequently

Hi Ged,

I have 58.54 GB left. It's the latest version of PS.

So I can't just delete the temp files in the c-drive? There seems to be lots of advice to do this but as mentioned in my previous post it when I do it says the file is in use in PS, I close PS and then it says the files can't be located.

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