In september 2020 I installed the premium deluxe version on my PC (steam version). At that time almost 100 GB was used at my hard disk. Today almost 157 GB are used without cache and addons ! The increase is only due to WU’s and SU’s!
Can I save disk space by completely deinstalling and reinstalling the game? I don’t think so, what is the experts opion?
Yep mine is 158 GB. No mods or add ons. Deluxe version.
I would not think uninstalling and reinstalling would do anything for ya.
No, uninstalling only to reinstall the exact same thing is not going to reduce disk space on the core sim software.
That won’t help. I deleted the training missions (15GB alone), landing challenges, most bush and discovery flights, all the extra liveries, some planes I never use, still 143 GB together.
Most of it is the offline map data I never use (nor want to). Wish you could uninstall that like on XBox.
4 GB is from the FBW A32NX which I fly all the time. (not included in the 143GB)
10 GB in other (stock) planes installed
19 GB in detailed airports (from world updates I assume)
30 GB in other world update related stuff (POI)
The rest all core stuff with the one big one \fs-base-cgl 64 GB, which I assume is the offline map data. To make sure I have plenty space for tomorrow I moved that directory to my HDD with a symbolic link, 64 GB extra available on my nvme SSD.
It seems to run fine so far (apart from a weird long loading time starting a flight but it wasn’t accessing the disk at all during that, server problem I think) While flying the sim hardly every reads data from disk anyway, 99% of the disk access in flight is to the rollingcache if you have that enabled.
You can move as many directories as you want. Symbolic links work great, fs-base-cgl is simply the easiest to move (biggest gain) while the offline map data in there is only ever needed when going offline. fs-base is the next biggest (13GB) but I assume there is lots of actual useful stuff in there!
Anyway easy way to get some breathing room on a cramped 256GB SSD.
To move the directory, first make a copy to the HDD, then delete the source directory.
Then open a Windows PowerShell and type
cmd /C mklink /J “C:\Users<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Packages\Official\Steam\fs-base-cgl” “D:\FS2020\Packages\Official\Steam\fs-base-cgl”
Or whichever directory you want to use. Any read or write requests to the first (source) directory are now redirected to the second (target) directory. For all intents and purposes, the directory on the C drive no longer exists, hence delete the data there first.
Windows file explorer indicates it with a little arrow.
I’ve used this for other things before (iPhone backups insist on using the C: drive, not so with symbolic links) and currently have over 312 GB of data in C:\Users on my 256 GB SSD with 98GB free space.
Mostly due to world updates, actually. If you remove all of them, you’ll find the size reduces to much closer to the size at launch.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.