Why does my footage have to conform every time that I open my project?

Question

Working on my senior thesis film, and I am using my university's Mac Lab. Whenever I open the project, Premiere has to conform all of my footage, which takes about an hour for the size of this project.
I thought it had something to do with the Media Cache Files and Media Cache Databases being stored locally on the computer you were working on. Does anyone know if that is the case for sure?
Does anyone know a solution for preventing my project from having to conform each time I open it?

Answer 1

The project does occassionally move from one machine to another. The project file and all of the video files are located on an external hard drive.
At our university, they wipe all of the user accounts at midnight on schedule. This means we can't store all 200GB+ of our footage on the local machine.
As I wrote in my other thread, I had come to the conclusion that Premiere was doing this because it generates all of the peak files and render files to the local machine. These files either get wiped by the school (because they're stored in
/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files
and
/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache
which are local, username-based directories) or they are written and changed (for example: I edit on computer A (where the project conforms all the footage), later, I go edit some on computer B (where it conforms all of the footage again probably because it's on a new computer), and then if I go back to computer A, it notices changes have been made to some of the generated files.)
Potential Solution(?):
I thought about trying to go to these directories and copying the folders and their contents to the external hard drive, and then copying and pasting them to the proper directory on a computer before I start editing, but that will require me to do a lot of copying and pasting.
My other idea was to try and change the location of where Premiere saves the Media Cache Files and Media Cache Database to their location on the hard drive (after I copy those folders from a machine once they've conformed), but I do not know how to change the default location for these fiels in Premiere before I open the project.
Thoughts??