Have you noticed your hard drive usage climbing steadily when working with ? Here's how you can reduce the disk footprint for each of your PCB projects.

Every time you manually save a schematic sheet or PCB design, Altium saves a local, compressed copy. You can compare between versions from the Storage Manager tab and manually delete versions that you no longer care about. This is generally a useful feature; however, if you are already using a version control tool (like Git or SVN) this functionality can be redundant. If you tend to save often (as I do), the number of history items can explode very quickly. On larger designs with many schematic sheets, I've seen Altium use a lot of hard drive space - over 1GB for just one design!

To reduce this hard drive footprint, decrease the number of days the local history will archive. Open the Preferences menu (DXP -> Preferences), then click Data Management -> Local History. Reduce the number of days of local history as appropriate to your usage of Altium. Since I use external version control, I have this set to 1 day. If you don't use version control (frown face) but still want to control the size of this folder, 3-4 days might make more sense.

If you have been developing for a while already, you can manually delete local versions from your file system. Altium automatically creates a folder named "History" under the main project directory. The files inside this folder can be deleted at any time.

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