Adobe Captivate 5 – Project Cache!

The new version of Adobe Captivate 5 features something called “Project Cache”. Basically the cache contains a lot of small files that will allow you to open your existing Captivate projects quicker and I’m sure they also help out on the new incremental publish functionality in Captivate 5.

However there are some issues that you should be aware of in regards to the Project Cache.

Everytime you open up a new project a new cache directory is created. If you – like me – work on multiple files and projects at the same time you will quickly find out that the cache has grown to be extremely big. The majority of the courses I work on consists of multiple chapters so one project can easily be comprised of ten separate Captivate files. This amounts to a lot of cache files. I checked my Cache folder size after working with Adobe Captivate 5 for five normal work days and it was a whopping 1.2 GB.

Therefore it is good practise to delete your Project Cache regularly in order to avoid wasted harddrive space.

Another aspect of such a large Project Cache is that it is stored in the “My Documents” folder on your computer. If you are working on a corporate network then chances are high that your “My Documents” folder is part of a roaming profile that is stored remotely on a server. If your Project Cache is very big then this is transfered and stored / retrieved on a server everytime you log on and off your computer.

In my particular case our Corporate Network have a storage restriction of 100MB for My Documents and if I exceed that limit I cannot save anything until I have deleted some files. Since Adobe Captivate 5 stores in the My Documents folder per default it takes about 5-6 hours of working before the limit is reached and Adobe Captivate will then crash. Worst of all is that I am not able to open up Captivate again before I have deleted enough files to get under the magical 100MB again.

The solution is of course to change the path for storing projects and Project Cache in Adobe Captivate 5. I have created a directory directly on my C:\ drive called AdobeContent.

The \\cphn0018 indicates that this is a network storage location:

Changing the default locations to a non-network location:

In theory you could keep your Project Cache files on your local harddrive until you run out of space. Most harddrives today have a lot of space and most likely you wouldn’t experience any problems for next year or so. However, filling up your harddrive with obsolete data is a bad idea ;o)

I did hear a rumour that it is possible to re-create a corrupt Captivate 5 file based on the data in the Project Cache, but I’m not sure if it’s true or not. Luckily I haven’t yet experienced a corrupt file in Adobe Captivate 5 yet (and only 1 in Adobe Captivate 4) and if you have the “Generate Project Backup” enabled you should be covered.

Edit: Here is updated information on how to recreate a project from the Project Cache files: http://iconlogic.blogs.com/weblog/2010/07/adobe-captivate-5-cached-projects-can-save-you-some-cash.html – Thank you Lieve for the link.