I used the utility “Everything” and I searched for all of the .blend1 backup files, from an old backup drive. I measured about 900 of such files and they cost about 10GB of space.
The files are lots of things, samples, examples, demos, projects (with multiple versioning), assets from other projects, templates bought from stores, etc etc…
In that case what is the meaning of the .blend1 files? Are there only for a fail safe? Have they got any big impact? Are they only there for worst case scenario?
As far as I know it has never occured to me to get a corrupted file on save in Blender. Perhaps I might remember that about 20 or 30 years that I use programs, perhaps I remember that it happened only once and this was about 10+ ago in Photoshop.
I consider that by 99% I might disable .blend1 files for good because either way I always use versioning in my projects.
Do you think that .blend1 are essential? I just think of selecting everything and deleting them, but still I have the doubt.
As nick said, its fail safe save. You can safely delete them if You know you wont need previous save (eg. original .blend is not corrupted or saved You file after deleting important model).
You can disable it, or increase number of saved versions. Preferences » Save & Load » Save Versions
Eg. if you set it to 6 You will have 6 last saves of each file:
imo They are useful sometimes even if you use Save Incrementally, so i keep them on, and occasionally delete all blendX files.
Eg. You have deleted or broke something in blend and then saved and continued working.
If You only have one file then You are screwed. If you Save Incrementally, then You have to rollback to last incremental save. But if You save frequently and have blendX on, then You can easily rollback before destructive change.
It does very rarely happend, but it cost You almost nothing in comparison to saved time.
Anyway, Blender does also save “autosave” files in case of crash. By default every 5 min, with file per sesion.
By default they go to system Temp folder that OS deletes when it decides.
I usually just use spacesniffer every few months and clean the rubblish.
A lot of the time I’m working with 4-8 gig USDs and Zbrush files so drive space fills up fast.
Yeah, have to do that regularly too… I am using treesize for that. Dont know spacesniffer, is it good? The images of it make it look like a bit like an overkill.
Yeah its pretty cool IMO. Its listing it in an explorerlike view. You can see on every level how much percentage of the diskspace lies in which folder. And if you go into a large one you see it for the subfolders aswell. The free version is more than enough and when you download you have the option to download a portable that needs no installation. So have a look.
Too many drives you have and two of them are full. These sorts of problems with storage driving me nuts.
I have figured out that once I am ready to full 3D again, I will go all-in for a NAS solution and create my own cloud data storage in LAN. I don’t want to think of storage capacity again.
I use an internal 2Gb SSD for running projects, all the rest goes on cheap HDDs that back each other up. Backblaze cloud backup has a copy of all the drives.
This setup is a little slower for older projects on the HDD, but way cheaper than NAS. HDDs reach around 280mb/sec these days at 18Tb sizes. Mobile HDDs without power supply are slower at 128Mb/sec.
