Where do we stand on Hard Disk: hidden beta files and other Elite Junk?

Boff'in · Dec 9, 2018

A couple of years back,

Elite could amas various versions of the games in the Hidden folders, (not the main public one, but the ones buried in the .appdata folder).
So as part of the being in a beta, you learnt to delete the beta version as a few of us, could not figure out why we ran out of HD so quickly in the first year of Elite.

Now since I don't clean up my hard disk as I don't get many warnings as we did in 2015 - the question is in Q4 2018, does the current ED launcher do the job of file maintenance automatically,
or do we still need a manual deletion?

(I'm on a hobby project of consolidating all my photos into one catalogue, from multiple phones/computers/backups from various drives and I need a fair few GB's as a slush-buffer)

Bunkerkind Anni · Dec 9, 2018

well, play it from steam, and you find it in your steam folder

i would wait for the release day anyway, since the launcher uses the beta files as "virtual cache" for files to download
aka, if you already have it on your HDD, the launcher will not download it again, and only copy over from the beta install.

Dagwit · Dec 9, 2018

You could have a look at this:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/462165-How-to-uninstall-the-Beta

Morbad · Dec 9, 2018

Shouldn't be deleting the beta unless you want to download several GB of redundant data and significantly extend patch times.

Moving or deleting your log files might be a good idea though. In ~20 months I've accumulated more than 80GB of netlogs.

moorison · Dec 10, 2018

Morbad said:
Shouldn't be deleting the beta unless you want to download several GB of redundant data and significantly extend patch times.

Moving or deleting your log files might be a good idea though. In ~20 months I've accumulated more than 80GB of netlogs.

In-game Screenshots are not compressed and will consume a lot of space, especially high-res ones. I tend to convert them to webp after some time, it is very efficient.

Morbad · Dec 10, 2018

moorison said:
In-game Screenshots are not compressed and will consume a lot of space, especially high-res ones. I tend to convert them to webp after some time, it is very efficient.

Yeah, this can also be a space hog for those that use the in-game screenshot hotkey.

Personally, I use a capture utility to grab .PNGs...no idea why Frontier had the game save screens as bitmaps.

Ian Doncaster · Dec 10, 2018

EDDiscovery has a nice feature to instantly convert the in-game screenshots to PNGs as they get made. (Plus all the other things like reading your journal, integrating with other tools, etc.)

babelfisch · Dec 10, 2018

Morbad said:
Yeah, this can also be a space hog for those that use the in-game screenshot hotkey.

Personally, I use a capture utility to grab .PNGs...no idea why Frontier had the game save screens as bitmaps.

I believe that's because BMP is lossless and basically doesn't require any resources.

Morbad · Dec 10, 2018

babelfisch said:
I believe that's because BMP is lossless and basically doesn't require any resources.

PNG is lossless and any system fast enough to run ED can capture a moderate compression PNG (which used DEFLATE that should go about 50-100MiB/s on a single thread on a typical PC running ED) on the fly essentially as fast as a bitmap (no compression, but higher I/O demands).

babelfisch · Dec 10, 2018

Morbad said:
PNG is lossless and any system fast enough to run ED can capture a moderate compression PNG (which used DEFLATE that should go about 50-100MiB/s on a single thread on a typical PC running ED) on the fly essentially as fast as a bitmap (no compression, but higher I/O demands).

I know that PNG is lossless as well, it's still compressed. By the way, I never said it's a good reason.

Another reason would be that integrating BMP screen capture is way easier than PNG.

Just to clarify, I am not saying that BMP is the right choice, I just try to understand why FDEV decided to use it.

Shiro Akai · Dec 10, 2018

Boff'in said:
could not figure out why we ran out of HD

Ah, good 'ol times of single HDD build. Now I lost count of how many drives I currently have and what is my total disc space. I have so much of it I lost track long time ago. Plus recently I got 4TB NAS... Lets attempt to estimate disc count.

- OS SSD (250 GB)
- games HDD (1TB)
- programs HDD* (1TB)
- media HDD* (1 TB)
- storage HDD (?)
- games SSD (120 GB)
- additional SSD, mostly unused (80 GB)
- and 4 TB NAS

* - 1 drive, 2 partitions

With NAS running I can move all media and storage freeing loads of space. Some games are on separate drives so I don;t have to worry about running out of place.

/note to self - it's high time to do some cleaning.

Boff'in · Dec 10, 2018

hehhe I got 2 600gb so that's an issue these days hahaha.

The rig I am on is a consolidated and parts from friends and salvage from previous rigs since I'm economically disadvantaged

one is from 2005 and the other from 2009

I then limped along with that latter PC until 2012 when I gave up as it had motherboard issues seizing up the computer and needed a reformat after 3 months.
Then It was a mac mini- external hard disks and USB Flashdrives.

So I got redundant backups within backups, or partial backups scattered all over the place. even on a backup network drive

I think the total media content is less than 100gb, but it's organising it back down.

But as for ED, it would be nice *cough* Frontier Developments.
To *know* the client can backup vital configs and logs, zip them up so you perform a total uninstall/clean sweep and re-install ED to another drive.
Or a file cleaning service to go through old ED directories and system config files buried deeeeeeeep in windows and clean them out.