PokerTracker

I've just carried out my monthly backup and as usual, not included ""Processed Hands" from the optional list. Am I taking an unnecessary risk by doing this? What are the possible consequences?

The reason for carrying the processed hands are for cases where we might want to reimport from originals. It doesn't come up often but the space requirement is small so the downside is pretty minimal. Is there a reason you made this part of the backup ritual?

Well the "default" seems to be not to include them, so I haven't. But if I'm missing a trick I suppose I'd better include them from next month.

One year on and my thoughts have turned to this again, albeit with a different slant. I don't exactly play high volume, but these are now taking up over 2GB on my laptop. I know it's subjective, but for the sake of good housekeeping, would you say that deleting the previous years folders once you come to the end of the current year is a sensible practice?

Personally I would keep all of my hand histories, but it depends how important it is to you to be able to reimport if you ever need to. You could archive the hand histories separate from your PT4 backup - if you compress them they shouldn't take a huge amount of space given how cheap storage is becoming now.

I liked that suggested resolution Rider. So off I went to compress my files and on the very first one I tried I received an error message stating that the file cannot be compresssed because it contains the Euro (€) character. Ho hum.

Windows won't compress files with the Euro character in the filenames, but there are third party compression applications that will, and will give you more efficient compression too.