Database maintenance question for drive with frequent changes in content

[tomgoodell]

I have an SSD drive (J:\) on which I keep my working files for art projects. Every night that drive gets backed up to a hard drive that retains my permanent copies of all my files. On my J: drive I am frequently adding and removing files as my projects evolve. So there are lots of files and folders that, over time, are added to and removed from the J: drive.

I'm wondering what my best catalog maintenance practice should be. My goal is to keep the database clean and free of clutter that is no longer relevant (folders and files that have been removed from J:). I see a few options and I'm not sure how to differentiate them:

1. On the Maintenance screen of the Settings window, use Rebuild thumbnails
2. On the Maintenance screen of the Settings window, use Synchronize folders ...
3. On the Maintenance screen of the Settings window click Maintenance ... and select Optimize database (long process)
4. On the Maintenance screen of the Settings window click Maintenance ... and use the Clean up options
5. On the Maintenance screen of the Settings window click Maintenance ... and click either or both of the Purge options

[bugreporter]

In this case it is relatively clear, imho of course:

1. Usually not needed, unless you heavily change thumbnail sizes etc
2. Frankly, I don't know what it does exactly. It says "All orphaned files will be deleted from catalog". Ok, maybe it is the same thing as ...
3. In "Catalog Maintenance", use the first 4 options. Even the "long process" doesn't really take long, even with some thousand files, probably it's an old wording.
4. The 3 "Clean up" options do what you actually want.
5. Only useful if you want to recreate all thumbs or even the whole catalog database. And you will lose metadata that is not embedded in the files.