Why is CS5 stealing ALL my HDD space???

I have had CS5 for a while now, but last night I noticed something weird with a particular image. It's a 16 bit .tiff (fairly big at 350MB) and when I tried to crop it it dies in the ass. After a lot of head scratching I found I had 1MB of C: left (out of 350GB) It has obviously stolen 350GB from C: as temp ram I assume, but here's the weird part. I have a second 1TB drive which I initially set up as a scratch disc and it also "steals" 160GB from that disc!! It only steals it when I try and crop, up until then I have all my HDD space as per.

I shut down PS and I get my drive space back. This is only new as of last night, it's been running ballistic up until then. I have 12 GB of ram which PS is allocated 50% of.

I thought it was the one image causing all the grief, so I tried another .tiff (86MB) when I cropped it I lose 160GB of drive and crop function basically freezes.

I usually do this and it is instant. It will open the 250MB image faster than I can blink, but since last night, when I crop it (or try to) I waited up to 10 minutes and finally gave up.

My system is an i7 920 with 12 GB triple channel 1600 ram and C: is a 10k rpm WD, scratch disc is a 1TB 7200 rpm seagate. The system is fine, it's something that PS is doing which is clogging it up and stealing all my resources.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Is th crop tool set to keep the cropped pixels?

At any rate, open task manager as you crop. Watch to make sure only one instance of CS5 is running. Watch for something odd.

Flush the image caches in CS5 and ACR too.

Oh, and reboot. Just kidding.

I am guessing here, but I hope it helps. Besides, I really want to know how this happens myself.

Ah ha. If you just installed any anti virus software or backup software, uninstall it now.

I have seen this on servers when Norton auto recovery was active. It was tracking every read write file level change. It didn't matter if we excluded certain types of files. It consumed all disk space whenever we did large read write operations.

No new AV I have been running adaware before I even installed PS. This win7 64 install is only about a month old, so it's nice and fresh. Also no backup software, I simply copy and paste my files manually to my backup and external drive........ there are some things I still haven't automated!!

In task manager, when I open CS5 it grabs 105 MB , when I open up the 350MB tiff it goes up by about 350MB. When I crop the image (or try to ) it shoots up to 6 and a bit GB and stops ( I assume that's because it's reached it's allocated 50% of my 12 GB. Actually it's 60% of the 12GB is allocated.

Here is a screen grab of the preferences screen. Maybe someone will see something not right in there?
Note 1MB of C: left (I have physically 350GB left when PS is not running) and 470GB of F: when I have 560GB physically spare. So PS has stolen 6GB of ram and 450GB of my HDD for one 350MB image!!

I can't say if this is new (the stealing part) but I only picked it up last night as this is the first time it has frozen whilst doing anything. It's not unusual for me to open 15 or more 16 bit tiffs at a time and crop, rotate and generally bash those pixels to oblivion! and still never have a freeze or even a slow down....until last night?????

Where do I flush the cache? This could be a problem maybe if it doesn't clear it on shutdown automatically

I am not sure about the crop tool keeping pixels, it's just the default settings.

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Check your windows updates. Roll back the last one.

Check to be sure windows didn't run off and turn ON windows backup, too. I've seen that happen.

Now, out of curiosity, if you are using an action did you get a history snapshot or two into the mix by accident?

I think your issue is more likely your operating system or new software than CS.

If you can't find the flush, I'll go grab a screen shot for you.

I manually update windows and the last one was a defender update about a week ago. This is something new from last night. No software has been installed for at least a couple of weeks. I used it over the weekend and it was A-OK.

Windows Backup has not been setup from the install, but I just checked again and it's still turned off.

As for actions, to be honest I have never used them, probably should get into it though to speed things up in some cases!

Well, something is eating 10X the space it should, and then some.

Go find a utility called DiskMon. Install it. Find the offender.

S.Horton wrote in post #13536068
Well, something is eating 10X the space it should, and then some.

I know, hence the questions!

It is PS that is stealing it, either directly or indirectly after it opens a largish image. Shut it down and it gives it back to me.

Thanks for the help so far, I know it may sound like I'm saying no to everything you offered, but I have checked everything you offered and it's all clean.... except the cache flush which I still can't find?

I dunno. Try DiskMon. You may be surprised. There are other processes which can balloon disk consumption. You strike me as someone who knows well what's happening on the system level, so if you changed nothing and disk consumption went out of control, I think something is new.

Of course, that's what had me banging my head, I couldn't work out the "why now and not before" part of the problem....but please read on....you are going to love this one!!!

When I was cropping some images *cough* last night *cough, I was using a crop preset of 8*10 at 300 pixels per inch for some simple prints to be done.

I opened up a new image after that (my 350MB tif mentioned earlier) and wanted a 1920 crop to suit a widescreen monitor so I typed it in...........it left the 300 pixels per inch part in there. So basically I was trying to make a crop that was 1920cm *1080 cm at 300 pixels per inch.......weird mixup of units there.....and one BIG final image!!! no wonder it was struggling!! It also explains why other images were also struggling. I clear the pixels per inch box and it's an instant crop....just like it normally is....

Thanks for the advice anyway, maybe it will help someone else as blind as me in the future!!

You'll be happy to know I gave myself a foreheadslap

Not that it matters now, but I could never find the clear cache menu!

This isn't going to end up in the "dumbass thread" is it ?

To purge the Cache, you can hold down Ctl-Shift as you start Bridge.

I agree it can be aggravating to have software act erratically. The question is can you make this go away -- otherwise I'd say contacting Adobe Support will be needed!

psst Tony

pixelbasher wrote in post #13536251
When I was cropping some images *cough* last night *cough, I was using a crop preset of 8*10 at 300 pixels per inch for some simple prints to be done.

I opened up a new image after that (my 350MB tif mentioned earlier) and wanted a 1920 crop to suit a widescreen monitor so I typed it in...........it left the 300 pixels per inch part in there. So basically I was trying to make a crop that was 1920cm *1080 cm at 300 pixels per inch.......weird mixup of units there.....and one BIG final image!!! no wonder it was struggling!! It also explains why other images were also struggling. I clear the pixels per inch box and it's an instant crop....just like it normally is....

Thanks for the info on clearing the cache

pixelbasher wrote in post #13536651
psst Tony

Ahh, so you stumbled across your own answer -- good for you!

Well, once in a while I can actually toss out something helpful!

Mine was doing the same thing while running some actions two nights ago... CS4 would hang and my HD, which has around 40 GB free, would be full. CS4 showed that it was responding, but it wasn't responding well. I still haven't found out what the issue was, but I did stop trying to to run that action.

I did find that in my Temp folder for Adobe it showed being over 45 GB... I deleted it and then ran a disk cleanup just to get rid of all the other crap I don't need.

It's nice to see I'm not alone in this issue, but it seems you found a fix for your problem... Tonight I'll have to try again and see if I can get the actions to work.

(First Post! I'm not just a lurker anymore!)