Hi Kimberly,
The first question is how much VRAM (GPU Memory) do yoiu have.
Then you should be aware, that Blender is not the only thing hat might be using your GPU,.
Also, I think that using Linked Duplicates doesn’t help reduce the Memory used for Rendering, only helps with the size of the .blend file.
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So, I did some tests and the provided .blend file Renders fine on my machine. It looks like it uses a bit more than 8GB of GPU Memory though (if I read the Stats correctly). That could mean, that your backup is just under 8GB and the other just over…???
