Warning -- this is a computer/technical post. Folks not into this will find themselves waking up from a nap ...
I have four web sites of my own, related to wine, cooking, and 2 for Dungeons & Dragons (which I've played since 1983).
My wine and cooking sites have a lot of graphics, and a couple of years ago I purchased a plugin that reduces graphic size. I use the TinyPNG site to "tinify" graphics, and tried their paid plugin, shrinking file size without too much sacrifice in image quality. This makes pages load faster (less to download) and reduces the size of site backups.
Note from an IT guy -- NEVER have only 1 copy of anything. If your only copy of your site is on the host's system, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Anywho, last night I was looking through the my wine site with FileZilla, and spotted a LOT of situations where I have:
graphic-1.jpg
graphic-1.bk.jpg
Ah ... it appears the plugin makes a backup before it touches a file. Good strategy, right?
FileZilla has a search feature, so I searched for ".bk." ... nearly 1,000 files, totaling 50 MB. Which is over 20% of my total backup size, including the ClassicPress software. Deleting these unnecessary files reduced backup time and file size by a noticeable margin.
I removed the plugin, and manually shrink files using the site before uploading. Takes longer, but it keeps the mess from accumulating again. And I'm not uploading graphics on any frequent basis, so it's not a lot of effort.
I have four web sites of my own, related to wine, cooking, and 2 for Dungeons & Dragons (which I've played since 1983).
My wine and cooking sites have a lot of graphics, and a couple of years ago I purchased a plugin that reduces graphic size. I use the TinyPNG site to "tinify" graphics, and tried their paid plugin, shrinking file size without too much sacrifice in image quality. This makes pages load faster (less to download) and reduces the size of site backups.
Note from an IT guy -- NEVER have only 1 copy of anything. If your only copy of your site is on the host's system, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Anywho, last night I was looking through the my wine site with FileZilla, and spotted a LOT of situations where I have:
graphic-1.jpg
graphic-1.bk.jpg
Ah ... it appears the plugin makes a backup before it touches a file. Good strategy, right?
FileZilla has a search feature, so I searched for ".bk." ... nearly 1,000 files, totaling 50 MB. Which is over 20% of my total backup size, including the ClassicPress software. Deleting these unnecessary files reduced backup time and file size by a noticeable margin.
I removed the plugin, and manually shrink files using the site before uploading. Takes longer, but it keeps the mess from accumulating again. And I'm not uploading graphics on any frequent basis, so it's not a lot of effort.
