Annoyances: Version Cue & Storage
August 23rd, 2008
I haven’t given up on Version Cue. I love having all my artwork in one place with a nice version control system, and the benefits have out-weighed the weirdness.
And there is some weirdness to be found- for instance, here’s a common warning box I get: “The file has changed, do you want to discard changes or continue editing”. What? I just opened it. Discard what changes? Am I going to lose something if I click this? I don’t need this kind of stress in the morning.
All that, however, is for another discussion.
This is about how Version Cue can become a damn liability when it comes to storage. Bull in freaking China shop. Version Cue seems to have been birthed with the mindset of ’storage is a non-issue, everyone will be working in the cloud with thin clients in a few years anyway’. I admire the vision, however, we’re not there yet.
I didn’t worry too much about the versioning system taking up space when I started using it. I figured, hell- a small price to pay for being able to jump back and forth between states of my layouts.
Until one fine afternoon while working on a layout, I get a message from the yellow Windows bubble telling me that I’m running out of space on drive C:\.
Strange, the files I’m working on are on an entirely different drive.
Just to be clear; the Version Cue folder that I work out of is on a terabyte Drobo drive. However, I have my OS and applications installed on a 75gig Raptor (10,000rpm :D). This thing was flying along at half capacity a month ago.
After poking around C:\ for a bit, I find that Version Cue has managed to tuck away 44GB into a mystery folder: “…\Adobe\Adobe Version Cue CS2\data\content\0\”. And with what? Shit, I don’t know! Apparently just a bunch of “file”.
Again, this is *in addition* to the GBs of artwork in the expected Version Cue folder on the big hard drive.
And for the love of god, do not move these files around. I know that sounds like a ‘no shit’ move, but a man can go cross-eyed when he’s down to his last 50mb on C:\.
So what are these ‘file’ files? Apparently they are the actual versions of your artwork. Yea, I didn’t know that either. In a moment of desperation when my C:\ drive was gasping for air, I moved a few of the largest files to my large drive so my computer could perform tasks like booting up.
Everything was kosher for a week or so until I tried to revert back to an old version of a layout, and nothing happened. No error message. Nothing at all. Now, I was 99% sure it was from moving the ‘file’ files, but still an error message would have been nice incase I was dense that day.
Armed with luck and ‘last modified by’ meta data I pieced back together the cryptic ‘file’ files to their rightful home in their hyper-cryptic folder structure and got the versions of my layout to come up.
Now I just need to figure out how to move the app to a different drive without breaking anything. I hope the uninstaller doesn’t touch the mystery-data in ‘…\data\content\0\’ !
So the net of all this:
- Be sure to set the ‘data’ (the “file” files) and ‘backup’ files to be saved on a large drive. You can set this by going into the Version Cue settings from the Control Panel.
- Read Adobe’s “Understanding Version Cue” .pdf
- Be prepared to loose control of your artwork and ‘just trust the machine(TM)’. Good idea? I don’t know.
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