Hi, I bought nms on gog when it was v3.94. I downloaded sense all the offline backups and its 80GB. Im thinking to save space to delete the new (old) e.g delete the v3.96-3.99.1 and keep only 3.94 and save all the patches. Is it piratical and will work?

Thanks.

If you want to save old game versions, then definitly go with the Offline Backups, but then you must not miss any patch comming out, if you miss one that's all futile, these patches are not cumulative. GOG will usually keep the 3 last single patches in the list (with NMS sometimes the last 4 patches), after which the oldest will disappear replaced by the newest one. This gives you some time to collect them, but not too much...
What I do is I download the main files (usually 5 files with 3x 4GB in size) for the most important starting updates and then all the comming patches later which are smaller in size. I do this only if I forsee to save this main update branch otherwise I delete it with the next main update download. I then put all these files in a dedicated directory on a portable flash drive for later usage. There is a long dance to do in this case, you must first uninstall your current version, then install the main files from a past version, then all of the related patches in the right order. And with NMS you must also backup the save folder because newer saves are incompatible with older versions.

Tip:
If you decide to move again to the latest version, you don't have to redo this install dance, instead launch GOG Galaxy and chose 'Check Files' for the game, this will update it to the latest version. Dpm^t fprget tp re-copy the savegame backup in the save folder.

My intonation is for archiving, you see Im a data hoarder, but I dont own a $10b bank account so I need to think about the space as well.

So if the base version is ok and the patches as well (isnt bit-routed) so Im ok right? (I will still have the full version because I use the gogrepo script but 13G isnt that bad).

Thanks for your help.