Mods are taking up space on my C: drive despite setting up the pathways into my D: drive?

[Roxi2]

This has been a massive pain in my butt for awhile now, I'm trying to get all my mod files and games on one (significantly bigger) hard drive. However with each mod I download I'm losing space on my C: drive. What gives? The only thing I found that could be the case is the Virtual Install folders, which I've been told I should not delete. Is there a way to safely move them? Is this even the culprit?

[NovusIntempest]

You simply could clone your hard drive content 1:1 to the newer one and then use yyour smaller one as Media Drive for Music, Games etc. ...

[JimmyRJump]

This has been a massive pain in my butt for awhile now, I'm trying to get all my mod files and games on one (significantly bigger) hard drive. However with each mod I download I'm losing space on my C: drive. What gives? The only thing I found that could be the case is the Virtual Install folders, which I've been told I should not delete. Is there a way to safely move them? Is this even the culprit?

The Virtual Install folder should only add files for programs that are installed on the C-drive, or at least the drive that has your operating system.

 

My guess is you have a massive Temp folder sitting in C:\Users\*YourName*\AppData...

[DrakeTheDragon]

Where do you have your game(s) installed?

And what manager are you using for install?

 

For the Nexus Mod Manager (NMM) the Virtual Install folder is where the mods' folders and files are "actually" installed into, for Bethesda games it's like a complete Data folder, just without all the non-mod-added files and folders originally inside your game. Then into your game's folder the manager will only put so-called "hard links" (if it's on the same drive as the Virtual Install, otherwise, with Multi HD activated, it'll use "symbolic links" instead).

 

A hard link now is not that different to a file entry inside a folder's directory list. Actually, behind the scenes, every entry inside a directory "is" a hard link. These links point from inside the directory to the actual data on the drive, which in case of the NMM is pointing from inside your game's folder into the Virtual Install folder where the mods are actually installed into.

 

As long there's 1 hard link left pointing to a file's data, the data will survive. So if you remove the Virtual Install folder, the links inside your game will become the actual files. Of course you'll have effectively "killed" the manager at that point, but you won't have lost any of the installed data. Welcome to continue modding your game manually only from this point on. The mod manager is dead.

 

The good thing about that is, hard links do not consume any drive space (or nothing noticeable at least). The actual files are only installed once, inside the Virtual Install, and although the game (any everything else in case of hard links) will think they're inside the game folder also, there won't be double the drive space consumption at all.

The bad thing though is, there's no difference to the OS between directory entries and hard links, so if you take a look at the total space consumed by the files inside the Virtual Install and the total space consumed by the files inside the game's folder, they will both return a space consumption as if the hard links also were the actual files/folders. Only the total space consumption of your hard drive itself will be displayed correctly and not have double the size.

 

If you're using Multi HD, that is Virtual Install and the game's folder are "not" on the same drive, the symbolic links used instead are working a little differently. These "will" consume some additional space, but in total it's still very negligible. (Just a byte or such per link?)

But if you're not using Multi HD, then the Virtual Install folder and the game's folder "must" be on the same drive, or hard links will not be possible.

 

Oh, there's one additional thing with Multi HD, having Virtual Install and game folder on different drives. "Certain" types of files cannot be linked with symbolic links, for whatever the reason, so there's an additional folder similar to Virtual Install on the drive where you have your game. From this one again hard links are used to link the actual installed files into your game. So even when using Multi HD and ignoring the drive space consumption on the game's drive insignificantly rising by the symbolic links, it'll still rise some for those types of files which absolutely "must" be installed on the same drive where your game is instead.

 

If you're not using the Nexus Mod Manager, however, just ignore all I said above after the initial 2 questions.