Audacity Forum

Pobinr wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 12, 2019 7:03 am

An hour of WAV, a CD's worth is about 650Mb.

In Audacity, it's double that, because Audacity works in 32-bit float format (for best processing quality).

Also, while working on a project, there is "Undo" data. For example, if you have a 1 hour stereo track in Audacity (about 1.4 GB), and Amplify it, then there is 1.4 GB of data for the current project, plus another 1.4 GB of Undo data. Apply a filter to the whole project, and that's another 1.4 GB on the disk.

When Audacity is closed, the Undo data is deleted, but while working, Audacity projects can become very big.

Thanks for your reply. I only record 3 mins max = about 30mb
I have 6Gb spare on HD

Pobinr wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 12, 2019 12:09 pm

I have 6Gb spare on HD

That's running pretty close to the edge.

Just a few considerations:
Note that "Safe-sleep" or "Suspend to disk" will dump the contents of RAM to disk, so that could be several GB.
Even a 3 minute Audacity project can easily grow to half a Gig or more if you are doing a lot of processing.
I don't know how much disk space the built-in Apple Mac disk utilities requires for routine disk maintenance tasks, but I'd guess they require some, and some Mac updates can require a lot of space.

In short, lots of free disk space is a good thing

Thanks Steve, will endeavour to clear a few hundred of the photos off my HD, then give it a go

One of my best tech "investments", was a NAS drive. I only use it for back-ups, and it's not very fast over wifi, but I can access it from all my computers, which makes it extremely convenient. It's also works with Windows, Mac and Linux.

I'm not sure that I'd trust it as the only backup for really important work, but as it is two physical 1TB disks configured as RAID 1 (mirroring - each disk is a copy of the other), it provides a pretty good chance of recovery in the event of disaster. As I said, the main benefit is convenience, and it was not overly expensive (about $150 complete with disks).

Thanks I'll look into those drives. Meantime I have a 3TB USB hard drive as back up, I can use for any photos I don't wish to ditch