Confused By Purging

Ive looked through the forums but it seems Im getting confused about the best way to purge hands.

I recently upgraded to a SSD and in my wisdom decided I would import all of my old hands going back years. Obviously this took up some space and Ive now decided to get rid of all of the old hands only leaving maybe the last 6 months to a year but knowing if I needed to I could still import the other hands again. Ive also seen that unlike Hem1 you cant delete the hands and still have them in your HUD which is not an issue as the hands are pretty old and no longer relevant to the games I play in.

What is the best way to purge the hands to free up space? Ive seen it where people use the purge feature and it not free them up any space and Ive also seen it recommended that people simply start a new DB and just re-import the hands that they want. I should also add that I use Notecaddy and have seen that this could potentially cause an issue with purging.

Any advice would be appreciated.

The best way to do what you want is to start a new database and only import the hands you want (i.e. just the hands from this year, or perhaps the last 6 months) and delete the lifetime database. This is the best way to minimize the amount of space taken up if you have a small SSD as purging and vacuuming is not as efficient as if the hands had never been imported in the first place.