I have a directory folder that has almost 4 gig of files in them...a USB drive folder no less. I recently got a scare when I opened DO and opened that folder and almost nothing happened. I could tell instantly that the file size of these folders can be hefty. My question is twofold:
What should be a safe file size to have before carting off the remainder to other directory folders?
What to do if I get stuck and the folder doesn't open because it's too heavy? Is there a solution within DO that can solve this? Is there an option to turn off the icons for these files? (If there isn't...this feature should be implemented.)
At this point I would have to think a backup software product like SyncBackSE or Backup4All would have to get involved. In this case I would hope these would read the 4 or more gig sized folder and read the files long enough for me to move them safely to another directory.
Or perhaps a DOS utility to move the files to another directory from the
command prompt?
It doesn't matter what the total size of files in a folder is. It's just a number.
The total NUMBER of files in a folder can slow things down a bit but the total SIZE of those files is irrelevant. Even then, you have to have 10,000 or more files before you will even notice a slowdown, typically, and even then it won't usually be much of one.
I've used Opus on directories with literally 300,000 files in them and, while it takes a while to read the folder in (for obvious reasons), everything works just fine. Similarly, I've used Opus on folders with hundreds of gigs of data in them and makes no different because it's just a number.
If you have a lot of files on a slow removable or network drive then you may want to avoid things like Thumbnails and the Description column, since Opus has to open and look inside of each file to generate that data. That's about the only thing you might have to worry about, though.
It will never happen. There's no such thing as a folder being "too heavy." You will run into the limits of the storage device or filesystem long before you reach any other limit. Don't worry about it.
As Leo already explained: nothing to worry about. But just a few questions:
1. Did you defragment your drive? Highly defragmented files can slow access. 2. Did you Scan your Drive for Errors? Right-click on the drive -> Select Properties -> Go to the Tools tab at the top of the Properties window -> Click the Check Now button. 3. What's in the folder: movies, music, images? When you enabled Folder Content Type Detection, DOpus has to read Artist/Album/Year/Track etc. - info for all the files. 4. Did you switch to Thumbnail - mode? Go to Preferences -> Lister Display Modes –> Thumbnails Mode -> Options and change some settings there to speed up things a bit. 5. Did you see nothing, or something like this (sometimes happens when i open very large ZIP files as folders; it's normal):
