Home Forums Discussions Problems Running out of hard drive space...ImportItems

I am running out of space due to a large ImportItems folder. I have another internal hard drive I could move this to if it is possible. Is it possible to move the ImportItems folder to say the G: Drive versus the C: and have Amazing Charts still find and use it? If so how do I do that and what are the implications for workstations needing access to it?

Thanks

William

There are a few ways to do it, but the easiest and safest way would be to uninstall AC and reinstall to your larger drive.

I agree with Bert on this. William, how big is your imported items folder and how big is your C drive?

Welcome William,

I too am curious about the size of your imported item folder.

Mine has 23,000 files yet only takes up 5.7 GB. (so about 250 KB per file,mostly pdf files imported through updox). I suspect you may be importing using a less efficient file type or else have a small hard drive to start with?

Yeah, that kind of got by me. How big are both drives?

It is possible to mount a NTFS volume directly into an empty folder. More info

For example, you could add another hard drive(or use your second one), create a NTFS volume, move everything in the Imported Items folder to the root of this new volume, then mount it directly into your now empty imported items folder. As far as any program accessing it is concerned, it's just a regular folder. You may have to make sure your permission are correct, but other than that, you're done.

Unfortunately , if you already have any files/folder on your current second hard drive, things could get a little messy as they will appear in the II folder also, best to start with an empty volume.

This is very useful for programs like AC where everything is in one folder. Use one small, fast volume on mirrored SSDs for the AC folder containing the databases, and another large, slower volume based on cheaper hdds for imported items. Nice to avoiding having to buy TB plus sized SSDs just to hold imported items. I've been running this kind of setup for years with no issues.

If you've never done something like this before, I would find someone who has, or at least learn how to on a non-critical system first. Anytime you mess with whole volumes, you risk lots of data...always have known good backups.

Thanks for everyone's responses. ImportItems is large right at 350GB. We scan using Multi-Page TIFF's @ 200 dpi but you are correct about the file sizes being too large. A 6 page TIFF is running around 25MB. That seems too big. Either way the damage at this point is done unless there is a way to reduce the TIFF sizes after the fact. I think I will try to find utility to do that first and see what that does.

PDF files seem to take less room. PDF Forge, Foxit offer free utilities to manipulate these files. I had a problem with some large files and used a utility to convert them to a smaller version (PDF to PDF). But the utilities should be able to convert TIFF to smaller PDF.

I would try adjusting the scanner settings first. The DPI settings sounds right, but did you adjust the color setting to grayscale? Scanning in grayscale can greatly reduce file sizes. 6 Pages at 25MB is very large.

This is why a lot people recommend the ScanSnap. It does all of this color adjustment, page rotation stuff automatically.

@Kevin, the issue is even if he does convert to PDF, the file extensions will have changed and all the Imported items will throw an error saying file not found if he does the conversion. I believe iFranView can do a TIFF to TIFF conversion. It has a batch option as well. I would test it first before trying it on your production data.

Irfanview will do this. The batch option to preserve folder structure is a bit tricky. Irfanview has a forum where it is discussed quite a bit. There is also FastStone Image Viewer, which is easier, but not free for commercial use.

You could use Irfanview to convert Tiff to Tiff and select ZIP, LZW(which are both lossless), or JPEG compression (if you can accept a possible loss in quality). Either option should reduce each file's size by a large percentage. In the case of black and white scans with a lot of blank area, the files should be a fraction of their current size.

Of course, as Sandeep says, always test first...a backup probably won't hurt either...