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Demon Cleaner
30th April 2015, 16:39
2 weeks ago, I had the idea to go through my biggest sets, and perhaps delete stuff inside which I don't really need. Some sets like PSX, DC, GC or XBox are quite big in size, and often there's duplicate games, so I decided to keep f.ex. only the console exclusive games. I also decided to delete everything that I don't like and everything that got quite bad reviews, for most of the time I was using Metacritic as a database, otherwise Google. If a game scored 55/100, I just deleted it.

As I already deleted Japanese or other Asian sets, I started to merge the EU sets with the US sets, and then started deleting the duplicates, which there's tons of. Only some games are US or EU only, and most of these are kiddie games anyway like Hello Kitty, Barbie, Ben Ten or such.

I finished my whole shrinking operation just now, and I was quite amazed how much space I created by doing this. I will give you a summary of what I did. PS3 games were already shrunk some months ago, from 300 to 200 games approximately, saving a bit over 2TB.

I even started with the N64 set, not because it takes a lot of space, but because most of the games come in 3-10 different versions. So I shrunk the set from 1582 files to only 316 files, but saving only 15GB of space.

So here's the results, the operation took me 2 weeks, 4-5 hours a day. Because I had to go through almost every single game to see what it was, and there were thousands. But I quite enjoyed it, and now I actually know a lot more games than before :)

Dreamcast: From 248GB to 100GB, saving 148GB
Gamecube: From 667GB to 72GB, saving 595GB
PSP: From 386GB to 154GB, saving 232GB
PSX: From 479GB to 97GB, saving 382GB
XBox: From 1.2TB to 150GB, saving 1.050GB

For the Wii, I didn't have a complete set, but I went through it nonetheless, from 247GB to 169GB, saving 78GB eventually.

So in total I saved almost 2.5TB of space! My NAS is now back again to "only" 65% full.

Harrison
30th April 2015, 16:59
65% full? That's your 12 bay NAS? How much is it using now then?

I had a similar idea to reduce the deadwood from my rom sets, but I still have that slight addiction bug to attempt to have everything ever released, which is a bit silly, but quite exciting to achieve.

I wouldn't be as ruthless as you though because take the Dreamcast for example. Many games were never released in the PAL/EU region, so US only version are needed, especially for RPGs, Shoot 'em ups and Beat 'em ups. And then you have a huge number of Japanese only releases, which initially you might think is pointless owning if you don't speak Japanese, but most of their games tend to be in English, other than sometimes annoyingly the menu systems. Same on the PSX.

I have however been doing exactly as you have for the original Xbox because it was a smaller than the PSX and a lot of its games were better on the PC, or have dated so badly I won't ever play them, so originals and copies of such games are going for that system.

It is all time consuming though, that is for sure.

One thing I've been considering for systems I don't play that often is to just download the Hyperspin rom collections, which are a lot smaller already due to play containing single working copies of each game.

Demon Cleaner
1st May 2015, 14:14
Many games were never released in the PAL/EU region, so US only version are needed, especially for RPGs, Shoot 'em ups and Beat 'em ups.
That's why I was merging the US and EU sets first before going through them, so that I don't miss US only releases. But like I mentioned, a lot of these were also kids games.

My NAS is 48TB, minus 8TB because of the Raid6, minus 4TB because one disk is not 4.00GB but 3.64GB. So I have a total of 36.20TB. It was already once 76% full, then I deleted some movies from my archives, and now I'm back at 65%, so 23.43TB are used.

Vangar
13th May 2015, 07:39
I'm similar to Harrison, I wouldn't be able to go through my Romsets and delete ones, because I want full TOSECs! Even if the games are bad, I feel this need to 'complete the set'

Harrison
13th May 2015, 11:12
My other reason is for torrent sets. I like to just hold the complete sets so I can easily update them just by joining a new release with existing sets. Torrentzip was a brilliant invention and PD is a brilliant tracker. If I start to break up sets I would never have the time to go through and manually grab new content I was missing, so instead I'm OK to just hold the lot for each set. Saying that, this is mainly for rom sets, not ISO sets.

For ISO sets I actually haven't downloaded many full sets, but instead have always just picked and downloaded individual games I've been interested in playing, so don't hold complete sets for most systems.

Demon Cleaner
14th May 2015, 19:22
I also keep the whole TOSEC sets, but here I was mainly talking about BIG files. I have loads of complete sets, I guess almost everything :) But these other sets were taking up a lot of space, so I thought shrinking them by keeping only what I would eventually play, would be the best. You know how big a C64 set is, well, it's another story with XBox if it takes up 1.2TB.

Harrison
14th May 2015, 22:29
That's why I never downloaded the whole Xbox or PSX sets in the end. I was tempted at the time the projects were running on BigGamer to build the complete sets, but looking at their size I instantly thought it would be silly do download that much when I probably wouldn't play most of them.

Remember the days when we though a 880KB floppy drive image was quite large? I'm wondering when we reach the point where we think the same for CD and DVD ISOs? CD 650GB files I suppose are not that large now we have fast internet connections as they only take a couple of minutes to download, but a 4.7GB DVD ISO is still a fair chunk of storage.

Demon Cleaner
15th May 2015, 08:47
With the never dropping prices of HDDs lately, could still take longer than we might think.

Harrison
15th May 2015, 09:36
That is true. The price does seem to be static for a very long time now. Gone are the days where the cost per gigabyte was dropping every 6 months.