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Do not put mods/downloads into your Vortex install directory!


Tannin42

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Nope. That would be Documents.

 

AppData is meant for caching and temporary data, but not for stuff people would consider their "saved data". And even if you use AppData, you'd have to store it in "Local" not in "Roaming", especially if you have big amounts of data. Roaming is meant for so called "roaming profiles", which are hardly every used in a private environment.

 

You'll find Skyrim's "plugins.txt" in AppData\Local, while Skyrim's user settings and saved games are in Documents\My Games. And that's for a reason.

 

WIndow's default backup is saving, Documents, for example, but not AppData.

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Straight from Tannin:

 

My Documents is for sharing documents between different applications. It's the user's documents, like a word document or an image. Stuff you may then use in a different application or send by email and stuff. Files that you, as the user manage and the application is just there to edit them.
The mods Vortex manages are not user documents, they are managed by Vortex and thereby application data.

 

 

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Nope. That would be Documents.

 

AppData is meant for caching and temporary data, but not for stuff people would consider their "saved data". And even if you use AppData, you'd have to store it in "Local" not in "Roaming", especially if you have big amounts of data. Roaming is meant for so called "roaming profiles", which are hardly every used in a private environment.

 

You'll find Skyrim's "plugins.txt" in AppData\Local, while Skyrim's user settings and saved games are in Documents\My Games. And that's for a reason.

 

WIndow's default backup is saving, Documents, for example, but not AppData.

 

Nope, sorry, but you misunderstand how AppData and Documents are supposed to be used, but don't worry, you're not the only one, by far.

 

AppData is the correct location for all application specific data, documents is the place for all user-maintained data.

 

Documents is for when you, the user, manage file and intend to share it across applications, i.e. a text document you edit inside fffice and then send per email. Files that you open in an application through a "open file" dialog, do whatever with it and when you close it the application forgets about the file.

 

Mods in Vortex are not that, Vortex manages the entire lifecycle of a mod. It downloads it, extracts it, has a database with metadata about a mod, ....

Vortex (and other mod managers) try to pick up on any changes you do to the mods as best as possible but that doesn't change the fact that conceptually Vortex is responsible for managing the mods. You install mods through vortex, you should remove them through it. And that makes them application data, not user documents.

 

We could argue about whether local or roaming is the correct location. local is intended for application data that is specific to this user account on this system. This is mostly caches. Roaming is intended for application data that is specific to a user, but not to the machine. If roaming profiles are not used on a system it doesn't matter at all in practice anyway but if it is it really depends on the user whether they want their mods and vortex settings/meta data/... to travel with them, but conceptually I don't see why your mod configuration would be system specific in general.

 

Finally, your argument about Skyrim placing user settings and saved games in documents: Let me just quote wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Documents here:

This folder is supposed to be a personal area where users store their personal non-shared documents. However, many software developers have ignored this convention and as a result, this folder has become a dumping ground for the application data such as files containing settings and saved games. Users cannot delete, move or organize these files without causing unwanted behavior in their software.

 

 

Also:

Until Windows XP, it contained other subfolders such as "My Pictures", "My Music" and "My Videos". Starting with Windows Vista, these subfolders were moved out of My Documents and were made its siblings.

 

Odd, how "My Games" is the only default documents directory that still resides below documents, right?

Why? Because "My Games" was never a standard directory to begin with, there is no api in windows for "get me the my games folder on this system" and hence all games coded it as "<path to my documents>\my games" and thus now it can't be moved or renamed, it's also the only of these folders that is not localized for different languages.

 

This is simply shoddy planning and development on Microsofts part, not something you want to use as an example...

Plain simply game settings and savegames are not user documents and should not be in Documents but it has developed into a de-facto standard because a lot of game developers were also confused about documents vs appdata.

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Actually, there's a "Saved Games" directory directly inside the user's profile (next to Documents, Pictures et al). And there's also "My Games" within Documents. This was never really consistent.

 

However, Saved games in "AppData" is just A BAD IDEA.

 

I'd argue that both "Saved games" as well as Vortex mods are largely "user managed files". There's no clear line between internal files and user managed files in many cases. What defines a "user managed file" anyway?

 

I'd agree that the Vortex database and other internal files belong to AppData - that's an area where the user should never interfere, therefore it's a good idea to hide that from the average user. But not so with the mod archives and their installation directories. But even then I'd never ever put it into "Roaming" but into "Local". You don't want to share the Vortex database over different devices.

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Because that's the default setting of Vortex. You can change it (and you should in my opinion). But why they chose "AppData\Roamin" as the default, is beyond me.

Sorry, i just wanted to abbreviate the link a bit.

 

The downloads (for Fallout 4 VR) are stored only under "C:\Users\***\AppData\Roaming\Vortex\fallout4\downloads" and the plugins.txt / loadorder.txt are located at "C:\Users\***\AppData\Roaming\Vortex\fallout4vr\profiles\HkEAgxL3G". But the downloads are not saved in the vortex folder "{base}\downloads" under "F:\Program Files\Vortex\{GAME}"

(Fallout 4 VR installed on F: and {GAME} = fallout4VR)

Edited by solkutter
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"Saved Games" was introduced with Vista because MS actually noticed after umpteen years they f***ed up, except at this time the industry had already established "My Games" as a standard and MS couldn't convince anyone of using the new standard.

 

Sorry, but I disagree whole heartedly: Save games and vortex mods are not user managed files. There absolutely is a clear line between application managed and user managed files:

User managed files are files you, as a user, create, update and delete directly with whatever tool you feel like. You can create a word document with MS Word, edit it Libre Office, send it to a friend with the opera email tool and then delete it with windows explorer. None of these tools will care.

That's a user managed file.

 

If you install a mod in Vortex and then delete it with windows explorer then Vortex will care. On the next start Vortex will try to clean up the links it created from that mod, delete it from its internal database and be really scared it could clean up something you actually still needed because it doesn't know what the f happened. You can't install a mod with Vortex and then "edit" it with wrye bash and uninstall it with MO, each tool has a different way of laying out the files. The individual files may be editable in other applications but not the mod as a whole. And if you do edit files, you're expected to do it to the link in the game directory, not the source file in appdata.

That's an application managed file.

 

Of course as a user (especially with admin rights) you can take control of everything on your system, the difference between user managed or application managed is whether application developers expects you to.

And again: This is not Vortex specific, this is true for any mod manager, except some will deal better with it (MO) and others worse (NMM).

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Because that's the default setting of Vortex. You can change it (and you should in my opinion). But why they chose "AppData\Roamin" as the default, is beyond me.

Sorry, i just wanted to abbreviate the link a bit.

 

The downloads (for Fallout 4 VR) are stored only under "C:\Users\***\AppData\Roaming\Vortex\fallout4\downloads" and the plugins.txt / loadorder.txt are located at "C:\Users\***\AppData\Roaming\Vortex\fallout4vr\profiles\HkEAgxL3G". But the downloads are not saved in the vortex folder "{base}\downloads" under "F:\Program Files\Vortex\{GAME}"

(Fallout 4 VR installed on F: and {GAME} = fallout4VR)

 

Sorry, but you're quite off-topic here.

Mod downloads are stored with the game they are associated with. If you're currently managing Skyrim and download a Dragon Age mod, the mod will be downloaded to the dragon age download location, not the skyrim one.

Since Fallout 4 VR has no separate game section on Nexus the files are all associated with "Fallout 4", not "Fallout 4 VR" and downloaded to your "fallout 4" downloads directory.

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