Need help understanding UE4's Autosave and Backup system

Hello,

recently, after noticing a rapid daily decrease of free space on my project hard drive, I’ve learned that UE4 by default employs Autosave and Backup system. These are manifested as Saved/Autosave and Saved/Backup folders inside project folder. I am a bit confused about how exactly these work, as there appears to be only limited control over them and yet, if you change a lot of content in the game in a very short amount of time, it can literally generate gigabytes of data a day.

I’ve found out I can disable Autosave feature, which I should not do if I want to be able to recover from crashes without much lost work. However, its the Backup folder I am more concerned about. Here are my questions:

1, I am noticing that both Autosave and Backup folders save multiple states of the same asset. I’d always expect Autosave to store only the latest one while Backup should store all the iterations. Why is there overlap between the two? Why does Autosave appear to partially do the same thing as Backup, storing multiple versions, not just the latest one?

2, Is there any way to disable Backup, not Autosave?

3, What exactly triggers Backup to store a version of the asset? Is it any change? Or is there some timer on top of that?

4, Is Backup ever automatically cleaned? Or do you have to clean it up manually otherwise it will keep going until the drive is full?

5, There appears to be some parse-friendly time stamping of the filenames in Backup folders, which implies some built in system to recover older versions. Does UE4 have some built in versioning tool where you can revert to older version? Or do you have to manually reimport the backed up asset from the Backup folder by hand?

So the conclusion is to… turn off Autosave, keep using Backup and clean Backup manually if needed? It feels a bit archaic to manage any data by having to navigate to a specific folder, sort the files by date and manually pick ones to delete :expressionless:

I am getting confused by half of the terms you are saying to be honest :slight_smile:

First of all. What I meant is what’s the recommended action to take when Backup folder size has gotten out of hand? In my example, my Content directory has about 200 Megabytes while Backup directory grew to about 5 Gigabytes. So it’s not unreasonable to assume if I worked on roughly 2GB worth of content, I could end up with 50GB of backups.

Second of all, I know there is some sort of Vault cache, and I know it takes space, but I have no idea what’s its purpose, and if UE4 clears it automatically on its own, or if you have to manually keep cleaning that up. And also what’s its purpose, given that Autosave already takes care of Autosaving… ?

Hey, thank you very much for taking the time for such an elaborate answer!

I’ve already read about most of the parts you mention, so I pretty much know what to manage/clean and when to do so. I guess it was just a bit unusual to get used to a concept of software which generates a lot of backup data with no control over it, gradually increasing data size without any safety precautions from filling up the hard drive.

I actually have 3 SSD drives + 1 HDD on my PC, one of the SSD being reserved for Unreal projects. It’s just 250GB, but only for the projects, nothing else. I was just thinking about it in terms of future scenarios, rather than something urgent.

I have also set up Git source control. Instead of backing it up to a GitHub or Bitbucket though, I’ve opted to push the repository to bare clone on my Google Drive instead, as 2TB for $9 a month is something Git hosting services can not top. Furthermore, I am already using GDrive to backup all of my other data too, so it’s nice to have it all in one place. I know it’s sub-optimal solution, but since I am working alone, not collaborating with anyone else, I think it should work.

So my final plan is to do Git commits relatively often, at least once every 2-3 days or so, have Git repository backed up on Gdrive, and then clean backups or migrate the projects as soon as disk space starts to be a real issue.

Thanks again for the help! :slight_smile:

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Thanks you so much. I’m quite new on this and this is a problem I’ve started having myself and your answer is very useful.