Reducing NinjaTrader 8 Folder size

[Tonkingrf1551]

Good afternoon,

My NinjaTrader 8 folder size in my Documents is around 300gb. I run a lot of backtests and trade several strategy's everyday. I do a weekly NT8 back up where historical data is not check and the file size is pretty small; However, I also to a complete PC weekly back up. This is normally fine but over the last couple months NT8 file is pretty large and so my pc back up is large. Is there something that I can delete inside of NT8 that will reduce the size? If so what is the downside of deleting it. Also is there a regular process that anyone used to keep the NT8 folder size in check? I have not deleted anything out of it.

Thank you for the help.

Ryan

[NinjaTrader_Manfred]

Hello Ryan,

Thank you very much for your message.

As historical tick data has a rather large size, it can lead up to several GB of data, especially if several years of historical data have been saved.

My first suggestion would be to click on Tools > Historical Data and remove any data therein you no longer need. You can do this by expanding the "Historical Data" category therein before right-clicking either individual instruments or the expirations therein and removing them.

Please note that depending on the provider you connect to, historical tick data might no longer be available. This means if you are running backtests going back several months or years you might want to not remove the instruments you test on.

If your account is with NinjaTrader, you receive 1 year of historical tick data. As long as you would not mind reloading this data you could also clear all historical data by right-clicking the "Historical" category and removing all data therein.

Last but not least, I would also suggest checking whether NinjaTrader's 'cache' folders are empty. These folders are cleared upon a platform shutdown but might contain data if your platform ever crashed or the PC lost power.

You may find these folders at the following locations:

• Documents > NinjaTrader 8 > cache
• Documents > NinjaTrader 8 > db > cache

Please don't hesitate to let me know, should you have any further questions!

[brucerobinson]

This is from memory so not necessarily reliable but I would suggest you also take a look at your Workspaces folder. Iirc NT Saves a new copy (as opposed to overwriting with a new date) every time you save a workspace.
Or something like that.
It sounds like you are quite ‘procedural in your housekeeping’ so if you’re perhaps saving workspaces on exit as a matter of course as I do daily…. Well, my folder was gigabytes although individual workspace files weren’t large.
Hope it helps
Kind regards,

[Tonkingrf1551]

Excellent tip Bruce. Thank you Manfred. Both of these had a large impact and are now corrected. I will just add this to the weekly back up routine.

Thanks Again,
Ryan