Hi! I’m pretty new to Unreal Engine and I was wondering if the size Unreal Engine is taking in my hard drive is “normal”. I installed the last UE version (4.21.2) a few days ago and I just realized it is taking almost 40gb (39.2gb to be accurate) in my hdd. My question is: is that the normal size of the engine or did I do something wrong?
Depending on the amount of time and the number of projects and UE versions, you will get also an increased consumption of space for the shaders being compiled (called DerivedDataCache). Last time I have checked I got 100GB just for these and they are located usually at: “c: \users\your user\AppData\Local\UnrealEngine\Common\DerivedDataCache” but you can configure it to be somewhere else.
PS: Note that this depends on how long your are using the engine and the amount of materials compiled, it only grows.
I have about the same amount of space used for my install or did last I looked but I also just removed an older version of the engine so it might have shaved off like 5gb or so.
Thanks you all for the answers!
Just to clarify, I think that what’s taking almost 40gb are not my projects, but the engine itself (my projects are taking another 10gb). And I only have 1 version of UE installed (4.21.2). I’ve attached 2 pictures showing this (one is the launcher telling me the total size of the engine, and the other is screenshot of TreeSize, showing the distribution of the UE_4.21 folder in terms of GB per “subfolder”). I mean, it’s not a big deal, but it just looks like too much size to me, and I don’t know if that’s a normal thing with UE.
If you check that DerivedDataCache I mentioned the location earlier, you will a lot there and that only grows the more different shaders are compiled per UE4 release.
Today I asked myself the same question after installing fresh 4.26.0 version as I saw my folder size being 40GB and I was wondering why it’s taking that much. I’m pretty sure I figured it out.
By default, when you install Unreal Engine it also installs files for target platforms like Android (6.48GB), IOS (5.84GB), Linux (*8.65GB) *and Lumin (8.64GB), each takes lots of space.
So, if you don’t need those you can uncheck them and it will free that space. To do so, you click drop down menu by the Launch button and you select Options. There you can uncheck not needed files and UE will re-configure folders with reduced total size.
Overall, my total folder size dropped from 40GB to 17GB.
Are you saying these settings are in the Launcher? I can’t find them there. Have they been moved inside the Unreal Engine itself? I would like to reduce the size of the Unreal Engine install.
Thanks a lot - found the options you mentioned and cut doen the huge size of the UE4 installation folder by more than a half! I wonder why an option to remove the unnecessary target platforms was not given at the very installation of the engine itself.
sorry to write to an old topic, but couple month ago when I installed the engine it occupied around 100gb, today I installed it on another machine and it is less than 40gb. I didn’t install Editor symbols, linux and other mobile target platform. Did something change? Maybe in the past it was installing all the above components but now it gives us an option?