Persona disk usage has risen above the warning limit - consider closing some documents.

[BKFC]

I'm using Affinity Publisher 1.9.0 on a Mac Mini with OS 11.6 (Big Sur) to create a photo album in the style of InDesign.  It's about 25 double pages with photos linked (not embedded).  I then opened a new 1-page file for formatting a page.  There was a long delay, at the end of which I got this message:

Persona disk usage has risen above the warning limit - consider closing some documents.

I don't get it.  I have 400 GB free on a 1 TB drive, and 8 GB RAM (but that's not disk space).

I just checked the preferences interface.  The warning trigger was set around 35 GB, and the MAXIMUM was around 65 GB.  Since I haven't finished adding photos or editing, I run the risk of getting a warning even at the maximum setting.

I've also looked at a previous project using the same process that should be about 1/3 the size of the present project.  The final .afpub size of that project is 2.2 MB.  But the present project .afpub size is over 600 MB.

I don't know how to sort this out.  The present file size is huge and I don't understand the disk limits.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, BKFC said:

I just checked the preferences interface.  The warning trigger was set around 35 GB, and the MAXIMUM was around 65 GB.

What do you mean by "MAXIMUM was around 65 GB"? I only see a Disk Usage Warning At slider (typically set to show MB) & two "Limit" sliders, one for RAM use & one for Undos.

[BKFC]

The maximum disk usage warning slider position is 65536 MB.  I have the same limit settings as you have mentioned.  So I have modified the two questions:

1. What the warning means when it is small compared to available disk size, and there is no limit setting.  I take the warning seriously if it recommends closing files, except that the only real file I can close is the project itself.
2. How a photo album project that has roughly 3 times the number of linked photos as another album is larger by a factor of 300.

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, BKFC said:

1. What the warning means when it is small compared to available disk size, and there is no limit setting. 

Whatever the available disk space, the warning will appear when the app is using whatever value you set it to. I do not know what you mean by "no limit setting" there is no way I can see that it can't be set to no limiting value.

Aside from that, I have no idea why your project is using so much disk space. It could be a bug of some sort, perhaps one that has been fixed in a more recent version. Version 1.9.0 is quite old, first released around the beginning of February. There have been around 8 updates  since then, plus the most recent 10.0.5.x beta versions.

[BKFC]

I will rephrase:

I did not know there was a warning setting until I triggered it.  Apparently it is not possible to set a hard disk usage limit, nor does Affinity set it, so the warning is more for "my benefit," though the largest number I can set the warning to has no relation to how much disk space there actually is.

I have now downloaded and installed 1.10.4, and the file size is now only 250 times that of the smaller project.  I don't know of any way to track this down other than by systematically deleting pages or else building the project back up from scratch.  As I think about this, the maximum warning value of 65536 MB is actually a rather large number, I guess consistent with a half-gigabyte file with 20 double pages of photos...

I have now tried to create a new project by copying and pasting page contents into the new file.  The application has crashed more than a dozen times while trying to do this.  In the process I discovered that I had mistakenly 'placed' some camera raw files rather than their .jpg versions.  The overall file size is reasonable using only .jpg files.  But placing even one raw file enlarges the Publisher file by ten times that file size.  I know to avoid this, but I'm surprised that Publisher lets me even attempt it.

[carl123]

8 hours ago, BKFC said:

though the largest number I can set the warning to has no relation to how much disk space there actually is

I think the Devs just set default values for this setting based on general usage of the apps

If you are working on extreme projects or encounter this warning message otherwise you can override the slider and type in any value you want 

 

Or just ignore the message if you know your disk space is good

But in saying that, there may actually be something "wrong" in the document/app causing it to use such a lot of disk space

Personally, I would do a Save as... to a new file name just to clear out any redundant data from the old file and then see if the message reappears.