I installed P3D on a separate drive, not on C drive where my Win10 OS resides.. and yet my C drive bloated up..  when i click on storage settings, it shows P3D content, client and scenery have occupied 100 GB.. no place to breathe for my other apps.. but when i check program files, roaming, local and other LM folders, the foot print is very small.. just a few GB.. why does it still show as 100 GB on C drive? 

 Sounds like you didn't specify where to install your addon's to. By default, I think that it's some absurd location on C, but you have the choice to change that during install.

Because of the Package cache?

The main core P3d was installed on a separate drive but the addons folder is on c drive. Not many airports there except a few fsdg airports. 
 

where does the client content and scenery end up finally?

If you installed P3d onto a seperate drive, then that's where your entire default P3d resides. Did you delete or get rid of the zip file from LM as well as what was extracted prior to installation? Each one is good for approx 22.7gb.

C is the default install location unless you specify otherwise, but even then everything you install will put something in your C windows as that`s the link to your registry, that then allows programs to link with each other. That`s why your Windows install will grow over time.

@Adrian123 answer's is the right one and the only reason it gets bloated.

Unfortunately there isn't much to do that I know of:

1. You can manually delete the P3D packages only but will have to keep the original installers somehow whenever you'll want to uninstall/modify the installation
2. Otherwise you might want to move your entire Package Cache folder from C: to another bigger drive and make a NTFS Junction with the same name at the same location on C: pointing to the other drive location.

The former is less cumbersome probably, the later will affect anything you're installing but it might be better in the long run if you're installing many programs and you have little room left on C:

NB: if you go the junction way you might have to redo the junction every time you uninstall something. A simple .bat you double click is good enough for this. There is a bug in WIX/MSI which is removing the junction every time you're uninstalling a program and the devs have stated they won't correct this at all (IIRC I've seen this statement in a GitHub or similar bug report comment)

I wish LM is offering the content and scenery installers as DLC during installation, downloading and copying the files directly, without the need to keep the full installer around in the 'package cache' folder.

Edited June 18, 20205 yr by RXP

ok i see.. didnt know about the package cache until now.. I dont want to mess with it.. will leave it as it is and keep a close watch on disk space in the C drive.. I wish LM installed everything in one self contained drive, the way LR does it.. its so much easier to maintain and do housekeeping.. right now P3d files are spread across dozens of folders all over my PC.. so hard to track where things are installed and their dependencies.. 

my original p3d installer exe's are all on an external HDD.. i installed it from there.. maybe it unpacked everything to a temp folder in C drive before installing it to my D drive.. 

Did you check Prepar3D v4 Add-ons and Prepar3D v4 Files in your Documents folder? 

Some scenery and aircraft install there. 

 

yes i did. only very few airports installed there.. about 10 GB or so in total..  this 100 GB is apart from that.. it shows up under "apps"..  now i only have 20 GB left out of 195 GB in my OS drive..  

i think the solution may be found here: (will try it out tonight)

 

 

 

If you have any ORBX installations the back-up path is to the c drive, so you need to check the space being used, if you need to move the backups to another drive you can alter the path in ORBX central.

Edited June 18, 20205 yr by onebob

yes, i have the orbx library path in my d drive.. in fact, i'm migrating all my orbx addons from within P3d folder to the external library folder. i'm told that its easier that way when i update to the next point release.. otherwise, may have to reinstall all orbx stuff. 

but this 100 gb is being shown as p3d client, content and scenery explicitly.. so its the package cache thing.. 

Yes that’s the way I use the library install. however there is a temp and backup location for downloaded files,  in ...Settings - Downloader ... just check. If this is using to much you may want to consider moving them to another drive.