After a period of time, you can accumulate a large number of snapshot files. They provide an electronic photocopy of all accounts, reminders and letters ever printed. Once the account is finalised you don't usually need to keep them. Occasionally clients look back at them but it's overkill really. These should periodically be deleted.

 

Snapshots are named using the system date so the list can be reordered by name and older files deleted quite easily. Or just order them by date and delete the oldest. This is best done in Windows Explorer.

 

There is also a menu option to delete snapshots in Access Anaesthetics. Go to Maintenance Menu > Drive Cleanup. At the bottom of the screen, you can delete the snapshots. First enter a number of months in the 'Show snapshots older that x months' field. The default is 12. Click the <Analyse> button. This will show how many there are and the space they take up. Then click the <Delete> button.

 

There is no automatic function for this, so you should do it say one a month, or even once a year.

 

WARNING: When you have a large number of snapshots (thousands), this function will take quite a while to count them, so be prepared to wait when you click the <Analyse> button.

 

You can alternatively use the <Archive> button, but all this does is move the snapshots to separate folders for each year. This won't save any disk space. The purpose of this is to be able to maintain a static folder that does not change from day to day, so as to reduce backup requirements on a network server backup system.