23 hours ago, Wnuk said:

Do you recall how big SU 6 was for you on Steam?

I think it was about 15G, but I'm not absolutely sure. I do know for sure that it wasn't 85G!

3 minutes ago, b1bmsgt said:

but I'm not absolutely sure. I do know for sure that it wasn't 85G!

It was for me on Steam.  I waited 4-5 days after SU6 debuted before updating.  After Steam installed it's own little patch for MSFS, I fired the sim up and couldn't believe it wanted to download 80+ Gig.

I thought something was off with my install and the game wasn't detecting the files already installed.  Since it seemingly wanted to install the entire game, I went ahead and uninstalled what was there and did a fresh download of MSFS via Steam.

On 11/3/2021 at 2:00 AM, YMMB said:

The may help ..or not...

Is MSFS installed in the default location e.g. C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Local\Packages......?

In my case it isn't and with last week's update I also faced the prospect of a large download.  I noticed the download was pointing to the default installation location while my program is on a separate drive, G:/MSFS2020.  I changed the pathway to the correct location and the update became approximately a 1gig download instead.

Default location. I only have one, large SSD, so nothing can become fragmented or confusing. In theory anyhow. It’s the MS Store version. Or at least it was before I rage-deleted it. I’ll probably give it a good few months, and wait for at least 2 more major updates before I attempt another reinstall. Might even wait for DX12 to get properly up and running before I re-enter this Beta-like farce.

SU6 for me added a net of about 3 GB, that's all. As others have indicated, most of the update overwrites old files with new ones. This seems to cause confusion.

29 minutes ago, cobalt said:

SU6 for me added a net of about 3 GB, that's all. As others have indicated, most of the update overwrites old files with new ones. This seems to cause confusion.

It may overwrite files and see a net change of about 3GB folder size. But there is no question that the download size was 85GB. No confusion about that.

7 minutes ago, Wnuk said:

But there is no question that the download size was 85GB.

No.It.Was.Not - 16.3Gb for me (or thereabouts)

1 hour ago, SierraDelta said:

No.It.Was.Not - 16.3Gb for me (or thereabouts)

Same here.

I had to suffer through 83 gigs as well

To hopefully stop more fingers pointing at Asobo, I thought I'd point out that redownloading entire games instead of updating them isn't a Flight Simulator issue. It's happened with other games, across multiple platforms, on MS Store, Steam, Xbox One, PlayStation 4... I don't think there's any obvious cause, but it certainly isn't unique, and is either a localised issue with a problematic installation (file corruption, perhaps) or unlucky encounters with bugs in each of the store platforms.

Edited November 4, 20214 yr by March Hare

On 11/3/2021 at 1:40 PM, Bobsk8 said:

You probably have as much chance of installing MSFS and running into a horror story , as  you have getting hit by lightning. It is only a very small minority of people that seem to run into install issues. 

Maybe so but I'm not going to waste my time downloading huge amounts of data just to update a few files.  I'm satisfied flying my Jenny in FS2004.

5 hours ago, SierraDelta said:

No.It.Was.Not - 16.3Gb for me (or thereabouts)

And there in is the issue at hand. Your download was 16GB . Others were much larger. No one knows why.
 

But Please don’t tell me mine was not 83 GB as you didn’t slog though 16 hours of downloads like some of us had to. 

11 hours ago, Wnuk said:

And there in is the issue at hand. Your download was 16GB . Others were much larger. No one knows why.
But Please don’t tell me mine was not 83 GB as you didn’t slog though 16 hours of downloads like some of us had to. 

You're right, I should indeed have worded that differently - sorry.

What has worked for me with every single update is this:

After the first phase in the MS Store (typically 0.4 - 0.6 Gb) do not launch MSFS immediately. Instead find your usercfg.opt (mine is in C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache) and look at the value of InstalledPackagesPath at the very end of the file (mine is D:\MSFS). That location should contain the 2 subdirs (Community and Official) where the vast majority of your installed files reside. If that isn't the case, simply change the path in InstalledPackagesPath and then launch MSFS.

3 hours ago, SierraDelta said:

What has worked for me with every single update is this:

After the first phase in the MS Store (typically 0.4 - 0.6 Gb) do not launch MSFS immediately. Instead find your usercfg.opt (mine is in C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache) and look at the value of InstalledPackagesPath at the very end of the file (mine is D:\MSFS). That location should contain the 2 subdirs (Community and Official) where the vast majority of your installed files reside. If that isn't the case, simply change the path in InstalledPackagesPath and then launch MSFS.

Don't get me wrong, it's good if it works and thanks for sharing. But that just shows how messed up the update process is. I shouldn't have to dig into some files deep within the sim system to check why it's not working and change something in that file to make it work. Especially when the majority of people most likely don't even have the knowledge of tinkering with these files in the first place.

this happened to me too. Steam install. Over 85GB "update" 😐