I have been struggling to optimize space on my computer’s hard drive. I use an external drive for documents/drawing files. Can you move all of your application SketchUp files to an external hard drive? I see in SketchUp - Settings - Files - There shows the address of (Components, Materials, styles, environments, text, templates, etc)
If I were to move them to the external drive, would I mess things up? What problem might I have? If it is not broke, don’t mess with it, but it could save a lot of space.
I don’t believe you can install an application to an external drive and it’s not a wise idea to be working on model files saved toan external drive, either. Lots of examples of users winding up with fatally corrupted SketchUp models because they were working on them while saved externally.
Are you still using SketchUp 2021 with High Sierra?
You should follow your own advice. An external device usually is a lot slower than the internal storage, so it will affect the performance. You shouldn’t even work on files saved in an external device, there are dozens of threads of people that have lost all the data of their files and 99% of the time it’s due to working either from an external device or the cloud.
If you get a license you can use Trimble connect to have a secure backup of your files, a subscription gets you unlimited storage.