Ren'Py Trying to save space on disk

[psyco0]

Because of the way disk formatting works and how files are allocated on a disk, with the default formatting options, files smaller than 4KB (4096 bytes) take up 4KB on the disk. Each RenPy game has its own folders for "lib" and "renpy", which are primarily very small files and, for one particular game, the 78.9MB of actual files between both of these folders takes up over 1GB (about 1037MB) of space on my hard drive. Multiply that by the almost 600 RenPy games I have downloaded and that's nearly 600GB of wasted space due to what I would consider redundant files.

Anyway, can I just have 1 instance of the "lib" and "renpy" folders on my hard drive and move them between the folders for the games as needed or will that cause issues?

EDIT: upon closer inspection, the allocation size on my drive is actually 1MB

 

[Winterfire]

Because of the way disk formatting works and how files are allocated on a disk, with the default formatting options, files smaller than 4KB (4096 bytes) take up 4KB on the disk. Each RenPy game has its own folders for "lib" and "renpy", which are primarily very small files and, for one particular game, the 78.9MB of actual files between both of these folders takes up over 1GB (about 1037MB) of space on my hard drive. Multiply that by the almost 600 RenPy games I have downloaded and that's nearly 600GB of wasted space due to what I would consider redundant files.

Anyway, can I just have 1 instance of the "lib" and "renpy" folders on my hard drive and move them between the folders for the games as needed or will that cause issues?

EDIT: upon closer inspection, the allocation size on my drive is actually 1MB

If you want to hoarde that stuff for some reason (so I assume you don't keep them in your computer), you prob won't mind having a few external hdds, and those are fairly cheap (quick amazon search: 120 bucks for 5tb).
If you want to optimize your storage and believe "lib and renpy" are the same across all renpy games, just keep a copy of them and exclude from storing them for each game, then apply that copy whenever you want to play those games, but I suggest against that.

 

[whowhawhy]

for renpy, see

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for many small files not actively in use, put them in archives.

 

[Penumbral Evanescence]

Because of the way disk formatting works and how files are allocated on a disk, with the default formatting options, files smaller than 4KB (4096 bytes) take up 4KB on the disk. Each RenPy game has its own folders for "lib" and "renpy", which are primarily very small files and, for one particular game, the 78.9MB of actual files between both of these folders takes up over 1GB (about 1037MB) of space on my hard drive. Multiply that by the almost 600 RenPy games I have downloaded and that's nearly 600GB of wasted space due to what I would consider redundant files.

Anyway, can I just have 1 instance of the "lib" and "renpy" folders on my hard drive and move them between the folders for the games as needed or will that cause issues?

EDIT: upon closer inspection, the allocation size on my drive is actually 1MB

psyco0

Just out of curiosity, have you tried using some Windows-based utility tools like

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and

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perhaps?

 

[whowhawhy]

Penumbral Evanescence
his problem was tiny files he knew about taking up at least 1mb of space each and him not knowing it's what his drive's cluster size was set to before the edit. the solutions are reformatting, keeping unpacked renpy games elsewhere, keeping them archived after/before use, or wasting time figuring out which renpy games can share engine files so the duplicates can be deleted.

 

[Penumbral Evanescence]

Penumbral Evanescence
his problem was tiny files he knew about taking up at least 1mb of space each and him not knowing it's what his drive's cluster size was set to before the edit. the solutions are reformatting, keeping unpacked renpy games elsewhere, keeping them archived after/before use, or wasting time figuring out which renpy games can share engine files so the duplicates can be deleted.

Ok that makes sense - Thnx for the summation of the problem statement

keeping unpacked renpy games elsewhere

Can also keep them stored on an

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as well. That might be one such option too to help with saving disk space on their local device

 

[Goeffel]

Nah, unpacking them to external drive typically uses even more space (on that external drive) since those often come preformatted with HUGE blocksize.

psyco0 if you have enough RAM you could create a RAMdisk and format it, with small blocksize*) to unpack those Ren'Py games to and play from there.
Then when you're done for the day, save RAMdisk as image on harddisk - that's just one big file then so no problem with large blocksize.
next day just a RMB on the image file to create RAMdisk and load image into it, ready.

this way comes with the side-bonus that you play from a disc maybe 80 times faster than some SSD. AND your harddisc / SSD can fall asleep while you play and live longer (lesser # of read and write)

Doing this needs some discipline, as in remembering you're playing on a virtual harddisk, so not saving your progress to real harddisk: any shutting down the computer results in complete loss of progress.
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I am a happy user of

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toolkit. Not only is it open source, but also well documented, and comfortable to use. (like eg. asking me to first save to image before unmounting volume. )
and it can format with blocksize as small as 512 Bytes.