Tips For Freeing up Disk Space?

shebashetan7

Well-known member
Hi all,

For a little while, I've been trying to free up as much disk space as possible on my 2 TB SSD. I currently have close to 800 gb of free space now. I've been going through all of my DLS installed content and deleting a lot of old, unused, or otherwise unwanted assets to make room for new ones. Does anyone have any tips that can be helpful for making the clean up process less tedious, or more efficient? I've been going into the dependency lists of routes I plan to get rid of and removing deps that are used only by the route in question. Thanks!
 
I night take a little longer, but have you tried the reverse? Right-click content and choose: List Depandants.

This will let you know every route you use this particular piece of content on all in one shot.

Bill
 
Unless you are one of those Trainz users who insist on copying everything that is on the DLS onto your own HDD/SSD, then in my experience deleting unused/unwanted assets will do little to free up space - ignoring the fact that base and built-in "unwanted" assets cannot be deleted anyway. The vast majority of assets range from a few kilobytes up to a few Megabytes in size with most at the lower end and many of those at the "big end" are assets made with SketchUp which I studiously avoid.

Your post prompted me to do a survey of my currently installed/built-in assets - 10319 of them.

Those over 100mb = 34 - only 4 of which are installed from the DLS. The 3 biggest, all over 500mb, are built in cabin interiors.
Those from 1mb to 99.9mb = 2865. While I didn't attempt to subdivide and count them it was clear that the majority of those are base/built-in.

So the vast majority of my installed assets are less that 1mb in size.

Sorting them all on their status/origin.

Built-in/Base (including those that are obsolete) = 6580
Installed Payware (which cannot be deleted in CM) = 828
Installed from DLS = 2189
Installed from DLS, obsolete = 22 (I will delete those)
Modified (assets of my creation) = 47
"Third Party" (????) = 16 (all of these came originally from the DLS so go figure!)

Deleting "unwanted" assets (unwanted, not necessarily obsolete) is always problematic. If you later download a new route that requires those deleted unwanted assets then they will be back on your system again.

Many of the posts on this issue that I have read have made the observation that storage is now so cheap that installing a bigger SSD is often an easier option.

My thoughts.
Peter
 
I have gone through this exercise many times only to end up restoring content because the dependents filter lied. I have also gone through this exercise and ended up installing the same content again after downloading or restoring a route from backup. I concur it's easier to put in a larger hard drive and be done with it. It's a lot easier that way than dealing with this.

Recently, I did some maintenance and found I have a lot of really, really old assets. As I started to look through these, I found that some are really nice but ended up being forgotten. So again so much for cleaning up content because these buildings and other assets have now found their way on to my routes again. The trains, however, are way too old to look any good now, but seeing these along with the other stuff did bring back memories of the heady days of TRS2004 and before when making and sharing content was a heck of a lot easier. Seeing some of the names too of content creators no longer with us too, set up some memories of those days in the early forums when we used to have a blast with waffle cards when going too far off topic, and changing avatars as we moved up the ranks.
 
Concur with JCitron. I recently bought a 6 TB external HDD drive from Target for $130 and change. I then copied over all my "extraneous" content to there to free up space on my main system drives. As much as I would like to flat out delete a lot of the old content, some of it has this irritating habit of popping up as dependencies for routes that continue to get added to the DLS, much of that content from sites that are sketchy at best, or now long gone. It's aggravating and a pain, and might put me close to being considered a "hoarder" - then again its a resource for many items that are no longer available. In my case this is mostly discrete individual items (or packs) I've saved over the years. And while I haven't gone this far yet, if the save is of a current installed db (even if from an older version of Trainz), I can simply repoint the game to the save and extract any required items - which is something I'm sure you know. My point is that, having spent my 40 some odd working years involved with computing systems in one form or another, and having burned myself way too many times with neglecting to save my own copy of this or that file, thinking I'd never need it again going forward, or that there was always a save on my employer's system - I now save everything on my own devices, even if only on thumb drives. I've strayed a bit further afield than your original inquiry, other than suggesting ways to make and keep your own backups or archive. Then clean the live files accordingly. Not sure that helps in making the process any less tedious, but then, storage space is cheap.

So far I haven't found any way to eliminate items with no dependents systematically other than per individual item, not that someone may have written such a utility or script to do that. If there is such a thing, it's in private hands as far as I know. It could be one of a number of useful utilities that might be applied to Content Manager.
 
So far I haven't found any way to eliminate items with no dependents systematically other than per individual item

Easy to do:

• In CM set on default filter ("Installed"):

- click any line then hit Ctrl+A to select all
- right-click the list and select "List Dependencies Recursively"
- in the new window click anywhere in "Asset KUID" field, hit Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C

• Set a new filter as follows:

Installed > True
Built-in > False
[optional] On Download Station > False/True at your convenience
AND NOT
Asset KUID

• Click in "Asset KUID" empty field then hit Ctrl+V


CM now displays all installed assets that have no dependants.
 
Last edited:
Post updated: please read "List Dependencies Recursively" instead of "List Assets in New Window" (wrong copy/paste)
 
Easy to do:

• In CM set on default filter ("Installed"):

- click any line then hit Ctrl+A to select all
- right-click the list and select "List Dependencies Recursively"
- in the new window click anywhere in "Asset KUID" field, hit Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C

• Set a new filter as follows:

Installed > True
Built-in > False
[optional] On Download Station > False/True at your convenience
AND NOT
Asset KUID

• Click in "Asset KUID" empty field then hit Ctrl+V


CM now displays all installed assets that have no dependants.

Don't you also need to eliminate Sessions and Routes as well as "Built In" (2nd bullet point)?
AND NOT - Session
AND Not - Routes
 
by the way... Have you checked if TRS19 is doing it's five sets of backups? If so you might want to bump that down. I do my own backups so I set mine to zero.
 
Don't install Windows 10 - its bloatware takes up more space that TRS19 ever will in my opinion.
 
Excellent idea. That would free up a lot of space in your system and would also cut your power bills. Two problems solved with one solution!

Excellent. There will be plenty of space then to put extra coffee cups and other things that need to be tucked out of the way along with the unbent paperclip used to open the automatic cupholder.
 
I suggest doing away with the motherboard. They never seem to have the right socket or Northbridge for the new CPU you just have to have, and they eventually fail anyway.
 
Not sure of the Backups issue. My current is set to the default 7 days, has 9 backups, and only totals 1GB. I looked at my previous installs of T:ANE ans TRS2019 which were about 1TB each, and the backup folders were no bigger. It must only backup incremental changes?
 
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