I'm not very computer savvy and definitely not well-versed in Poker Tracker, so please bear with me.

My hard drive is basically full right now, which is making it difficult for me to continue importing hands. I was looking through my Poker Tracker folders and noticed that they take up several gigs. I am a relatively low volume player, so I can't imagine how much space some other people's PT stuff takes up. Where do you guys store all this stuff? I'm afraid if I delete anything I will be losing data and I'd like to keep all my hands in there.

There are compacting options available for PT2, but I'll let pat talk about those.

I think people with large databases tend to just buy bigger hard drives. Last I looked it was ~$100 for a 500G hard drive . . . that's a lot of space.

Wow that's a lot of gigs. I have never used external hard drives, but I might have to look into it.

That was for an internal drive. External drives are going to be a bit slower if you're using USB (or even firewire), though eSATA sounds effective from what I hear.

Open the File > Maintain Database Names window.
How many entries are there? How many of those databases do you still use? If there are some that you DO NOT use, what are the file names in the last field listed on that window?

Also, go to the c:\program files\poker tracker v2 folder.
What files do you see there with MDB as the file extension? What are their names and sizes?

I will look this stuff up later when I get home.

I only have one database.

I see a lot of .pbd but no MDB.

They have to be there. Make sure you have file extensions turned on.

From the Windows Explorer menu select the Tools option and then select Folder Options.

Click on the View tab.

UNCHECK the box that says "Hide extensions for known files types" and click the Apply button.

The following files have .mdb extensions:

Database (1.31 GB)
hhcopy (1.16 GB)
hhdb (1.38 GB)
ptrack (1.99 GB)
ptrack_backup (1.68 GB)
ptregv2 (120 KB)

Database (1.31 GB) - I don't know what this file would be. PT wouldn't name it like this, maybe you manually renamed a file?
hhcopy (1.16 GB) - You can get rid of this one.
hhdb (1.38 GB) - KEEP
ptrack (1.99 GB) - KEEP
ptrack_backup (1.68 GB) - you can get rid of this one
ptregv2 (120 KB) - KEEP

On the File > Maintain Database Names window in PT2. What is the value in the last field for the entry you have there? Is it ptrack.mdb or database.mdb. If it's ptrack.mdb then you can get rid of the database.mdb file too I would imagine.

As to the hhcopy and the ptrack_backup.mdb files - these are copies of the hhdb.mdb and ptrack.mdb file made prior to the last time you compacted these databases. They aren't needed but I would urge you to have backups of the files made onto a CD/DVD if you get rid of these 2 files.