Does Vortex store downloads in multiple places?

[Yakis0ba]

I'm playing Skyrim AE, if that's of any relevance to the following.

I'm doing a clean reinstall of Skyrim, and after uninstalling it, I deleted the game's Steam folder. The Data folder was about 50GB of stuff.

Then I went to the folder where Vortex is installed and deleted ITS Skyrim folder--about 50GB of stuff. I now wonder how Vortex handles downloads. Are some installed in one place, others in another? Or does Vortex download mods into its own folder, then install those mods in a game, keeping the original "copy" of the mod in its (Vortex's) folder? Or are some stored in the Vortex folder and others in Skyrim's folder?

I guess what I really want to know is, If I install a mod via Vortex, is there stuff in Vortex I can then delete to save disk space?

[showler]

Vortex stores the downloaded archive in one location (with a separate folder for each game).

 

It then uses a "staging folder" to extract the mod from the archive, following the instructions of any installer options that might be included (this would include things like which plugins to install and which assets to install.)

 

It then "deploys" the mods to the Data folder by creating a hardlink. This is a special link that tells windows that a file that's in one folder is actually in another folder. When it does this it chooses which link files to create by following the rules you set regarding any conflicting files.

 

The files are not really in the Data folder, so you can't delete the ones from the staging folder. And you have no reason to because the 50gb of "stuff" in the data folder doesn't actually exist. Windows reports the size of the actual files in the staging folder, but the hardlinks take up no real space on your drive. There is no duplication of files or waste of storage space.

 

Having said all that, NEVER uninstall a game or delete the game's installation folders without using the "purge" option in Vortex to remove the hardlinks first (or straight up uninstalling all your mods in Vortex). It will confuse things since Vortex has no ability to keep track of what you are doing outside of the program.

[rmm200]

Decent description - except replace one occurrence of "with" with "without".

 

Always purge before doing anything to the game directory.