Discrepancies between updates pre/post download sizes

[kakuma369]

I have recently noticed a difference between update sizes of KB K for Kilobyte that then become GB G for gigabyte when downloading. Sea of Thieves showed a 1.+ GB became an 112 GB download. While the update page itself said the update was a 5.4 GB sized file. Can someone from Steam explain this for me?

[kakuma369]

I forgot to put in that this has been seen across multiple games, multiple times. So not an isolated incident.

[Zukabazuka]

The first number is the update size, the second one is how much space it needed to install the files. The updater have to open the files and a lot of them have big sizes. So every time they open one it adds to the second number.
It's not extra download size.

[crunchyfrog]

I think you may be reading it wrong.

It will report several sizes during the process. As Steam downloads compressed and encrypted files, what it downloads needs to be sorted and changed around before finally being written elsewhere to it's final place.

So you will commonly see the actual file download size of an update. Then you will see it ptach afterwards, and that will report the total file size that the data is being patched to.

[kakuma369]

Ok. But why is this updater staying on my drive. I had over 550+ GB worth of space on my hard drive until the middle of last month. Now I only have 194 GB. It seems to me like what I'm being told and what I'm seeing dose not add up. If what your saying is true then I should not be looking at a 300 GB loss of space.

And thank you for responding.

[crunchyfrog]

Messaggio originale di kakuma369:

Ok. But why is this updater staying on my drive. I had over 550+ GB worth of space on my hard drive until the middle of last month. Now I only have 194 GB. It seems to me like what I'm being told and what I'm seeing dose not add up. If what your saying is true then I should not be looking at a 300 GB loss of space.

And thank you for responding.

Ah in that case, it's again down to how Steam works.

Are you still downloading something with that report?

Because when Steam downloads it can reserve up to THREE TIMES the space needed because it needs to decompress and unpack stuff and that needs a lot of swap space. It cleans it all up (or should) when the download and update has completely finished.

I obviously can't give you specifics of that loos of space but that's you need to look at it. You should always allow LOADS of space. Valve recommend you have at least 10% space on your drive left, as it starts to trip up performance if it gets too low.