I didn't buy much at all (no sceneries purchased) at the last Black Friday sales two weeks ago, but I was surprised to find out that my Steam installation of MSFS Premium (...\users\appdata\roaming\...) with all World Updates installed is now over 422 GB!!

Maybe this explains why re-starting Windows is taking forever.

This is odd since I didn't have this issue two weeks ago. I have a 2-TB NVMe system drive with about 1 TB free space. SFC /scannow, Malwarebytes, and Window Security did not detect any issues or malware.

I think I need to go on an MSFS software diet. But before I do, I'm curious to know if the size of this installation is normal.

If you have all the MSFS core files and updates installed, what is the current size of your MSFS folder? 

That does not sound normal if you're saying you don't have many addons installed.

I have a lot of stuff installed and I'm sitting at 210Gb.   to be more than double that seems odd.  Like maybe you have some sort of backups that you're not aware of (eg. Orbx has an option on their Central app, where everything you download is backed up.   If you then deleted 50GB of content, that 50GB will stay on your hard drive - just in a different place to MSFS.

My Steam MSFS folder (no community) is about 330Gb. This would include all the world updates and their downloads from Content Manager.

5 minutes ago, hs118 said:

My Steam MSFS folder (no community) is about 330Gb. This would include all the world updates and their downloads from Content Manager.

My community folder is about 80 GB, so your 330 GB size without community is close to what I have. If that is what others have too then my 400+ GB is likely the norm for MSFS users. 

@JYW, do you have all aircraft, sceneries and updates installed? 

I've deleted most airports, planes and packages of the world updates as I only use some airports from the WUs.
Deleting all those aircraft you'll most likely never take a seat in and all airports you will most likely never fly to should free up well over 100GB of space.

I've tried using the the "compress files to save disk space" option on my community folder (I use addon linker, so it's not the official community folder), and it saves a significant amount of disk space without a noticeable impact on loading times, so that may be worth a shot.

332 gigs. excluding the community folder, in which I only keep the absolute essentials for each flight. 

14 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

332 gigs. excluding the community folder, in which I only keep the absolute essentials for each flight. 

You're moving folders and addons prior to every flight?
What are the benefits for you?

Nope. I mostly move two files. Departure and arrival airport. The rest stays. My community folder is about 9 gigs large, and I have about 18 items in it.

I ruthlessly evaluate every single item I put into my community folder in terms of how it adds to my experience. If it turns out, it doesn't, I wont put it into my community folder. 

Edited December 9, 20232 yr by Ricardo41

Hello all,

I just did a "properties" check on my MSFS folder (I don't know if this is what you guys are talking about)

Community folder is 617gb 

Official folder is 205gb

I also have a Microsoft Flight Simulator folder in there, which I did not have before and that is 2.05gb

I only have the Australian WU and only Australian sceneries. Sorry I lie, I do have Denpasar (Indonesia) and fly regularly from there to Perth which I normally do on an annual basis in real life.

Tony

 

10 hours ago, bofhlusr said:

Maybe this explains why re-starting Windows is taking forever.

Nope. That only affects the loading times of MSFS itself.

Before I uninstalled my MSFS folder was 313gb in size, (still) downloading World Updates and other content now so will be interesting to see if there's a large difference when I eventually finish (sometime next year at this rate...)

2 hours ago, Ricardo41 said:

Nope. I mostly move two files. Departure and arrival airport. The rest stays. My community folder is about 9 gigs large, and I have about 18 items in it.

I ruthlessly evaluate every single item I put into my community folder in terms of how it adds to my experience. If it turns out, it doesn't, I wont put it into my community folder. 

What are the benefits of that procedure?

I don't know how big the base install of MSFS with its updates actually is now, but my E drive, which contains MSFS and all of the addons I have now totals 1.75 TB.  Not that I run MSFS with all of those addons installed at any one point.

3 hours ago, Konterhalbe said:

What are the benefits of that procedure?

Faster loading times, for one. No "dead weight" in my community folder. My community folder looks like a nun's closet. 😆