This is still on my radar with the update coming on Thursday.  Going to dump my simulation folder to an external drive tonight so I can diff the two.  I also mentioned doing this diff on the official MSFS forums and that caught the attention of one of the forum mods, so if the results show that there might be a more efficient method to transfer the updates, maybe we can get some additional voices highlighting this.

Edited March 8, 20215 yr by marsman2020

Literally 12hrs and counting and no end in sight.

So here is what I found out with today's update.  I installed the update, fully updated my aircraft in Content Manager, and then used 'rdiffdir' which is part of the duplicity backup suite to generate a binary diff between the pre-update state 'A' and the current state 'B'.  This diff file can then be transferred to another computer and used to turn 'A' -> 'B'.  These are pretty standard algorithms for minimizing network use when updating files on remote servers, rsync has used them for decades. (Useage example here: http://incise.org/syncing-non-networked-computers-with-rdiffdir.html)

Size of download vis MSFS:  7.97GB ('welcome' screen) + 0.8 GB (content manager) = 8.77 GB

Size of 'rdiffdir' diff file: 1.6GB

So using an rsync type algorithm to do this update would have saved ~81% of the download size.

Edited March 9, 20215 yr by marsman2020

To add to the misery of my 30hrs update, the 1.14.5 put the previous update in another endless non updating loop. Now I have to restart the entire process again at 18 Mbit/s for the next update. How is this possible.