Unity projects bigger on external SSD

[Jihaysse]

Hey everyone,

I’m running into an issue: my unity projects are wayyy bigger on my external SSD than it should be.

For example, I have a 50Gb project on my PC which turns into 484Gb on my external SSD (via USB)!
Small 4-5GB turns into 50Gb projects too.

I don’t know where I can search for a solution. My 1 To drive is full with barely a few empty projects.

Thank you very much!

[Kurt-Dekker]

A large Unity project can have a lot of files. If your external file system is something that has a large cluster size, it can use a lot more disk space than you expect. Find out what the external filesystem minimum cluster size is, eg, if you write a 1-byte file to the disk, how much does your disk space go down. It can be a surprisingly large amount for certain drives using certain filesystems.

ALSO: building for different targets will use a different amount of space for the Library directory, which is transient builds. You should never source control Library.

You should however use source control at all times.

“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards

Please consider using proper industrial-grade source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

Prefab links keep getting dumped on Git pull

There really isn’t any fix because git works perfectly with Unity when configured properly. Best practices involve saving your work and closing Unity before using git. But if you understand how Unity does and does not flush changes to disk (or at least ALWAYS do a save-project), you can get away with leaving Unity open. The only thing linking EVERYTHING together in Unity is the GUID assigned to a script or asset. Name is irrelevant. Only the GUID connects it. This GUID is in the meta file. I…

Here’s how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

2 steps backwards

Yeah, what Praetor said is it… Debug.Log is your friend, and also since this is animation related, you can open up the Animator window when you expect the animations to go, and actually visually see where the state machine is, see which state it thinks it is in. You can combine this with Debug.Log() output at the locations where you set the animations to be what you think they should be, and that should lead you to some intel. I highly recommend setting up git source control. It really plays ni…

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

When to make a separate object or class/script? Help me think like a programmer! (Example in text.)

This is a reasonable initial approach. The problem is you have listed the parts, but you haven’t really listed how they interact, and even if you did, it’s still sorta up to you how to organize it. Only YOU will know how to organize it, and the only way you can tell is to do the work. I recommend this: first, develop ALWAYS with source control (such as git), and every time you get even the slightest thing working, commit those changes with good commit messages. Then move to the next thing, c…

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

Your techniques to share code between projects?

I have found that bundling your own code into DLLs only serves to slow down your workflow. I base this on several years of experience dealing with other teams well-intentioned packaging mishaps. With games, it is almost always useful to reach into library code, make a temporary tweak to isolate a problem, and then revert it. With DLLs this is impossible, making workflow harder and more brittle. I prefer to share source code at the C# level. That way I can reach into libraries trivially and inj…

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

Removing IL2CPP_cache from Project

Not sure what you are "auto generating" with... I usually start from one of my other projects, or a gitignore example online, and reason about all the parts inside it, and start from there. Like any other configuration change, after you make it, pay attention for a while to make sure it is what you want. You can always clone the repo somewhere else to verify that the correct files are being tracked. Doing so to a brand-new computer is the acid test to make sure you can still bui…

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

How to Git with Unity

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place.

[Jihaysse]

Thank you for your answer, Kurt!
I do use source control and it wouldn’t help here I believe. Same for the library folder as the project is 50Gb on my main SSD (on my computer) but 500Gb on my external SSD (with the same library, same targets, …). My external SSD isn’t a way to back up my projects but I simply don’t have space anymore on my main SSD

I think you’re right about the cluster size. I read about people having issues with the minimum file size set too high and as you said, Unity project has a lot of small size files. I probably have to move all of my projects to my main drive, format my SSD and try again. Thank you for the helpful insight and detailed answer!

[system]

@Jihaysse

Thank you for your answer, Kurt!
I do use source control and it wouldn’t help here I believe. Same for the library folder as the project is 50Gb on my main SSD (on my computer) but 500Gb on my external SSD (with the same library, same targets, …). My external SSD isn’t a way to back up my projects but I simply don’t have space anymore on my main SSD

I think you’re right about the cluster size. I read about people having issues with the minimum file size set too high and as you said, Unity project has a lot of small size files. I probably have to move all of my projects to my main drive, format my SSD and try again. Thank you for the helpful insight and detailed answer!

FYI: Unity doesn’t support having active projects on external, removable drives. You need to find a long term, proper solution to have a proper sized internal drive.

[Jihaysse]

Thank you for your answer.

Why doesn’t it support external storage? I have 3-4 projects on my external SSD and no issues. I only had issues when using a Cloud storage as it didn’t pass the CaseTest from Unity.

Unfortunately, I have no other solutions as I have an iMac with a tiny 250Gb SSD
Next computer will definitely be a Windows with a 1-2TO SSD, lesson learned