Managing Disk Space & Pruning Old Takes

How Sabes Pro Uses Disk Space

Because audio sessions can quickly reach hundreds of megabytes, Sabes Pro was built from the ground up to be extremely lightweight on your drive. It uses content-aware deduplication to break files into encrypted backup blocks. If an audio sample or track does not change between saves, Sabes Pro never duplicates it on disk.

A history of 50 active saves typically takes less than 20 MB of extra hard drive space.

Where to Find Storage Settings in the App

1. Open the Sabes Pro desktop application.
2. Click the Settings (gear icon) in the top right corner.
3. Click the Storage Maintenance tab in the settings menu.

Configuring Automatic Cleanup (Pruning Rules)

You can tell Sabes Pro to clean up minor draft saves automatically without having to think about it:

• Keep Last N Saves: Set Sabes Pro to keep only the last 30, 50, or 100 saves per project. Older intermediate saves are cleaned up in the background.
• Age-Based Pruning: Automatically purge unstarred saves older than 30, 60, or 90 days.
• Milestone Immunity: All Starred (Bookmarked) Takes and Certified Milestone Takes are permanently immune to cleanup rules and will never be deleted automatically.

Running a Manual Disk Cleanup

If you just finished a massive album project and want to instantly reclaim drive space from draft saves:

1. In Settings → Storage Maintenance, click the blue button: Prune Unused Blocks.
2. Sabes Pro will scan all project databases, delete unreferenced backup blocks, and compact your local database.
3. A summary will show how many megabytes or gigabytes of drive space were reclaimed.

Moving Your Backup Database to a Secondary Drive

By default, Sabes Pro stores its encrypted database on your system drive (in %APPDATA%\Sabes\repo). If your C: drive is getting full and you want to move your backups to a fast secondary NVMe or external SSD (like D:\StudioBackups):

1. Close Sabes Pro and exit the taskbar tray icon.
2. Copy the folder at %APPDATA%\Sabes\repo to your new drive location (e.g. D:\StudioBackups).
3. Launch Sabes Pro. In Settings → Storage Maintenance, click Change Database Location.
4. Select your new folder path and click Apply.
5. Once your projects load, you can safely delete the old copy from your C: drive to free up space.

Next Steps

Want to back up your cleaned project to the cloud? Read our guide on Setting Up BYOS Cloud Storage.