The Elite Dangerous game stole half of the disk space! How can I return it?

[Meresiga]

Hello everyone!
I've been playing Elite Dangerous since 2015. And yesterday, after some strange requirement to reinstall the game when starting it, I discovered that it occupies a total of 183 GB on the system disk space.
In the folder with the game at - C:\Users\my_name\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments - the game occupies 127 GB, and in the folder with the system files at - C:\Program Files (x86)Frontiers – the game takes 56 GB.
It's kind of nonsense that the game would use so much disk space – more than the operating system and other programs!
The question is this: What can be deleted in order to free up disk space?

 

[metatheurgist]

50G is about the right size for the game installation. The stuff in appdata should not be that large, are you sure that's not MB instead of GB. The only thing in there from your game is your visited stars cache and it looks like there is now some PP crap as well. Mine is only in the MB.

 

[Meresiga]

are you sure that's not MB instead of GB

I am 100% sure that the size is specified correctly in GB, not MB. Exactly 127 gigabytes.

 

[Mr T]

Hmm.. I suspect you might have a few different versions installed at the same time perhaps? Click on Versions in the launcher and see what's there.

 

[Robert Maynard]

In the "Products" directory you should have one or two directories (depending on whether you play Legacy or not):

elite-dangerous-64
elite-dangerous-odyssey-64

The first is Legacy, and can be deleted if you don't wish to play that version of the game.

The second is the Live version of the game, Odyssey & Horizons.

All other folders in the "Products" folder then contain old versions of the game.

 

[Nowski]

It's kind of nonsense that the game would use so much disk space – more than the operating system and other programs!
The question is this: What can be deleted in order to free up disk space?

Do you take a lot of screenshots? The game saves them as .bmp files and they can be 300Mb each, which soon adds up..

 

[Meresiga]

All other folders in the "Products" folder then contain old versions of the game.

For a better understanding, today I will take screenshots of the contents of the folders and indicate the size of each folder.

 

[metatheurgist]

You need to just go through those folders in appdata and see what's taking up the space.

 

[Meresiga]

Well, here I am, posting screenshots:

This folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Frontier\ED Launch\Products - is 52.7 GB in size.

This folder C:\Users\meres\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments - has a full size: 127 GB

Inside it there is a Products folder and in this Products folder there are four more folders. Three of them (except COMBAT_TUTORIAL_DEMO) are almost 40 GB each.

What can be safely deleted?

 

[Robert Maynard]

At the very least, the "Combat_Tutorial_Demo" and "Public_Test_Server_64" directories are unnecessary - unless you plan to go back the tutorials, noting that there is no current Beta version so the second of the two can definitely be deleted.

Looking at the file date/time data for the files the first image is suggestive of that being the version that the game is using. Maybe check where your game desktop shortcut is pointed to to double check.

 

[Meresiga]

At the very least, the "Combat_Tutorial_Demo" and "Public_Test_Server_64" directories are unnecessary - unless you plan to go back the tutorials, noting that there is no current Beta version so the second of the two can definitely be deleted.

Thanks buddy!

 

[metatheurgist]

Waaait...you have a products folder inside C:\Users\meres\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments? That is not what my installation looks like.

 

[Meresiga]

you have a products folder inside C:\Users\meres\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments?

Yes - C:\Users\meres\AppData\Local\Frontier_Developments\Products

 

[metatheurgist]

That is not normal. I don't want to say you should delete it in case some very strange choices about install locations were made at some point or maybe it's some weird steam thing but it's not normal.

To me it looks like you have an extraneous duplicate of the game files. The only thing I have in that path is an Elite Dangerous folder.

 

[Meresiga]

That is not normal. I don't want to say you should delete it in case some very strange choices about install locations were made at some point or maybe it's some weird steam thing but it's not normal.

My game was not purchased on Steam, but from Frontiers. At that time, Steam was not yet reselling games. That's why, whenever I updated the game, it was installed in its original location. Now, after deleting unnecessary folders, the size of the game has decreased by 60 GB.

 

[Mr T]

My game was not purchased on Steam, but from Frontiers. At that time, Steam was not yet reselling games. That's why, whenever I updated the game, it was installed in its original location. Now, after deleting unnecessary folders, the size of the game has decreased by 60 GB.

Yeah, unfortunately the Epic Games Launcher does the same thing as it just makes you download versions and updates from the Frontier launcher. Steam seems to be the only smart platform as it just downloads the files you need by itself rather than relying on the launcher (which is incredibly slow to download anything)..