DEV Community

Cover image for Fine-tuning checkpoints: what to actually keep, and what to safely delete
PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Fine-tuning checkpoints: what to actually keep, and what to safely delete

#finetuning #checkpoints #workflow

A student ran out of disk space on a free-tier GPU notebook because every epoch saved a full checkpoint. Most of those checkpoints were never going to be used.

A simple keep policy

  • Keep the checkpoint with the best validation score, not the last one — training loss can keep dropping after validation performance peaks.
  • Keep one early checkpoint as a sanity baseline to diff behaviour against.
  • Delete the rest once you've confirmed the best one still evaluates well after quantization, if you quantize.

For LoRA specifically

Save only the adapter weights, not a full merged model, at every intermediate step — adapters are a few hundred megabytes versus several gigabytes for a merged model, and you can always merge the best one at the end.

See reading a loss curve during fine-tuning for how to spot the actual best checkpoint before you delete the others.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour giving a talk titled 'How and what I do', with demo videos of his products Vaidya and Annapurna on screen
Talking through the products he has shipped

Pranjul Rathour in a black t-shirt holding a microphone in front of a chequered wall
On the mic

Pranjul Rathour pitching with a microphone in front of a projector slide at CSJMU, Kanpur
Pitching at CSJMU, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour speaking from the podium at VSICS, Kanpur
At the VSICS podium, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

Top comments (0)