C drive losing space fast each time I try to use Unreal Engine although EVERYTHING is on a different drive!

[DarkNibir]

Hi, I just installed UE4 yesterday and started to learn from today,
I got the 4.25.3 version, I changed the Engine install location from C to E before starting to download, since E has tons more space (around 60 GB of free space) than C (HAD nearly 7 GB free space!), but each time I used UE4, my C drive kept losing more and more space. Currently it has around 3 GB of space, I think I used UE4 for a few hours now.

It can’t be my Vault since I didn’t download them yet. But after reading in other questions I decided to change the vault location, not that it does anything since I have nothing anyways.
It can’t be the Epic Games Launcher since I installed that on E too, along with everything else during each step of the installation that had a changeable location option as to where I’d like to keep it.

I even deleted projects I made although I always change their locations to my E drive as well when I open new ones, just to see if it would have any effect, but the space occupied in C isn’t coming back!

Somewhere on the web it said UE4 dumps stuff to %localappdata%\UnrealEngine so I went over there to see how much space that takes! But it doesn’t nearly take the amount of space that dissapeared! (It takes around 250 MB, whereas, I lost like 4 GB or more!)

Someone help please! I should tell you, this isn’t my first time seeing this, a few months ago I tried playing around with Unreal engine and my C drive had 0 BYTES LEFT! That’s when I uninstalled UE4 last time and the space did come back quite a bit although even then, UE4 WASN’T INSTALLED ON C DRIVE!

[DarkNibir]

Unreal Engine is already on another drive, it’s in drive E.
everything from epic launcher to the engine and the projects, it’s all on drive E

[ClockworkOcean]

Bear in mind that 253MB is nothing. I think maybe your C drive is full of something else?..

Even if you move your vault and projects, the engine still sits on C:

You can move the engine using:

[Windows] Moving installed Unreal Engine 4 into another system

or this looks a bit better:

wiki.unrealengine.com

[ClockworkOcean]

Ok, download a copy of spacesniffer:

http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/

Run it on your C drive and you’ll find out where its all going…

[plasticMAYHEM]

why does no one post answers, everyone is posting comments

isnt there supposed to be like, 5 or 6 answers or something thats why they have the counter?/metric

ok so:

WINDOWS 10, which i hope you’re using.
Uses NTFS journal style file format, it allows whatever cluster size so you don’t have to stick with the 1990’s cluster sizes.
64K is a good place to start and blah blah blah good luck finding people talking about it.
mine is set to 1MB clusters which means a 640K jpeg on my drive will occupy 1MB of space.
its M.2 so i was like why not. i could set it to 2MB.

THAT BEING SAID.
since it’s journaled, you can fix it anytime you want if there’s a partition after it.

go to WINDOWS key then type in “manage” and you will get Computer Management app
load that and then go to Disk Management on the left side

open that window up wide and write a complaint to Bill Gates that everything always loses its persistence all the time.
and windows is sloppier than pigs in summer heat.

CHECK YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM DRIVE
mine is installed to C because microsoft are idiots and more or less forced that then its risky if you try to change it
though it can be done

IF YOU have another partition after it, you can MOVE EVERYTHING off of that partition
a SSD drive of a decent size is like $60 from samsung man the NVME2? its not the m.2 its the other ones
samsung has ALWAYS put out the cheapest best products
always

once the partition is clear remove it, click on the operating partition. then resize it to whatever you want.

mine is set to 48GB right now and windows is throwing a ******* fit so i have to change it
i allowed room for windows updates and its still throwing a fit because apps still keep trying to write to it
bill gates has the absolute worst idea of how to separate files and folders into useable things

ok? so seriously - i do want to know - how to get UNREAL to stop complaining about user storage
i tried looking around for the settings but i cant find it
it says theres 640MB left in user settings and every time i load it up from pinned to task bar it says both the errors
its real annoying

my breakout is TWO m.2 drives at 500GB each, i wanted to raid stripe them but windows would not let me
so its OPERATIONS at 48GB then personal storage at 225GB and temporary space at 192GB
then the other drives is APPLICATIONS at 338GB which was boosted due to problems
and then file storage for business documents and assets and stuff which is 128GB

then i have 2 ssd drives at 500GB each that are striped so i have 500GB of “warehouse storage” which is somewhat of a backup!

my backup is going onto a file server which will be my home automation hub and that will get 8 1TB drives for 4TB of backup storage on raid mirror

right?

this all seems to be inline with what you are experiencing being new to unreal engine
i hope any of this “dissertation of obviousness” is useful as you seem to have more of a problem than just your actual complaint

literally get some drives man and dont get the mechanical stuff
and dont leave anything on just one of anything ever just dont start stupid or youll be stupid 20 from now

speaking of stupid, i have to cut and paste this then log in again to post this - fabulous.
this isnt even something epic made its from another company and its an actual product

[tongucci]

In the editor open your Editor Preferences, from there under General, go to Global.

Set locations for Local Derived Data Cache and Shared Derived Data Cache, on a drive with large free space.
Actually before that create a new folder on that drive and set the locations inside that folder if you prefer.

These will be the cache folders for the version of Unreal you are using. Mostly for the compiled shaders and such, which take a lot of space.

Edit: If you don’t fill those areas, your default location for them will be inside your system drive I think, and that’s why it uses a lot of space to use UE4 there.

[plasticMAYHEM]

sorry - i wanted to go over that part about your hard drive situation

UNREAL Wants two folders from i can tlel - project folder, which it will ASSUME is on C at load time
and then the USER SETTINGS folder which is in userapps blah blah thing
the horribly idea that bill gates came up with apparently

so theres two places you have to go for everything instead of one

“remember when config files used to be in the same path, literally right next to the file”

im personally lookign for how to set the user settings folder
and make unreal be quiet about needing 700MB for settings j**** c****

OH HELL THIS was quick and i still had to cut and paste and log in again to post it

[xXMadManx99 (Radoslav Dimitrov)]

Same here when I installed UE4, it took me the whole day. My advice is to clear the installation dependencies and unwanted cache both from setup and from other things and change your project directory to not be on the same hard drive.

[DarkNibir]

I had windirstat so I used that, these files were modified at the same time I was using UE4, and they’re the largest single chunk files, does that tell you anything?

[DarkNibir]

yes they were blank, so I opened a new folder in E drive and set the two to that same folder, or should I have set them to two different folders?
and also, now that I have done this, UE4 is prompting me to restart it so I did, it’s currently in the process. will it clear all the stuff it may have put in C now that I have changed the folders?

[tongucci]

I personally set them in two different folders, I think it’s the way to do so.

With the newly set locations, all the shaders in your project will be compiled from scratch. But they won’t be removed from your previous location. If you remove the locations from the Editor Preferences, again the folders in the system drive will be active, and there won’t be compiling again, so the previous folders are remembered.

Edit: You can safely delete the data cache folders from the system drive. The only downside would be compiling the shaders again in case you want to use those default locations in the future.

[DarkNibir]

haha I’m still learning and following tutorials online so I doubt I’ll need the default locations in the future. Thanks for the help! I think it’s solved now. If it doesn’t get solved I’ll let you know!

[anonymous_user_8e185013]

Ill say none of these solutions work. I have found nothing that works, and cannot find any related Unreal folders on my c drive that show me where the data is going. I have a TB 980 M.2 that I bought specifically to work on my buddies book cover. I have set any folder you can find withing epic games and unreal engine to what I call the Z Drive. My file for his Book Cover is 100Gb which is now corrupted upon launching last night for no apparent reason. Anyways I had 20gb left on my c/Drive. Launched a new session to try to re-create the multiple week project that I lost. I hadn’t even added assets to the scene yet, Just started doing basic land forming and constructing a house with the basic building blocks. Within about 20 minutes my c drive was down to 5gb. I had found a folder on my cdrive that was creating a duplicate project folder as what was on my z drive. I deleted that and gained another 10gb as it had another generic project in there. Same thing though, within a few minutes I was back down to 5gb on my c drive and this time Im stuck unable to find out where the data is going. I only loose data while using unreal.

[anonymous_user_8e185013]

If anyone still lives in this chat, check this folder AppData\Roaming\Bridge-Bifrost I can find no forum about this one. But as I previously mentioned I couldnt find out where my data was going for the longest time, even after trying ever trick in the book. If youre like me and still having issues look here. Turns out that every asset downloaded to my Z drive was simultaneously being installed here as well.

[Cenobite69]

Ok After making sure files are not hidden in your users directory in C drive i can see where the bulk of the file space is being used by UNREAL it’s storing every version in c drive location for some reason even tho i had specifically installed everything to another drive location, Obviously if i delete the version files located in C drive it will break the editor, Why is this consuming space on both drives? I installed this on a larger separate drive for a reason, but for some reason you have 170GB eating up my smaller C drive thats meant to be used for windows only, that coupled with the fact every time i move stuff into this editor from another editor i have to clear a cache in that editors folder or it stores everything which has a huge impact on space. Why allow people to nominate drives to install the engine too if your only going to force part of the installation on the main windows drive, This is totally eating up my setup when i have plenty of free space it’s using the wrong space on my PC choosing to use the Windows only drive to store all versions of the editor. Is there anyway to fully install everything to another drive, i do not want every version of UE stored on C drive, it’s taking up way to much space.

[Cenobite69]

As Seen in this Pic each UE version is 15gb To 17gb

Why Unreal stores every version on a drive location you haven’t installed too beats me, defeats the purpose of installing to other drives if your going to hog all my windows drive storage space.
How can you get rid of these other versions safely without destroying all versions, the files are in batch versions under one common file with only numbers 0 through 9.

[Slava_Go]

It is good documentation written about DDC (Derived Data Cache).
You can read it here: Derived Data Cache | Unreal Engine Documentation
I’d recommend checking out the question “Q: I am short on disk space. Can I move local DDC elsewhere?” in the FAQ part of the document. I hope this helps!

[Oh_My_Magic]

Go to C DRIVE: ProgramData/Epic/EpicGamesLauncher/VaultCache. This is the drive EPIC will be caching your project files after you load them from you other drive. I found the CitySample 5.3 still sitting on that drive and freed up 62.5GB of space by deleting it.