Whoa - was wondering where some space on my primary (OS and documents primarily) drive was going and saw that the Divinity Original Sin folder in documents was taking almost 1GB! This is with 2 profiles (one abandoned when I felt the need to restart with some different skill choices).

I am someone who saves constantly, considering how long it takes most other games to get large save folders I didn't even consider this was taking up so much space... now I have to change my save settings and habits.

Why are the saves so large? (~25MB per save, each save has its own sub folder, with a bunch of separate files)

I can work around it by moving / archiving some stuff - but my main drive is an SSD with limited space (heck, I might have to do a junction to point to an outside folder, don't know how the game will react to junctions though :/), this sort of save file size is a bit of a shock.

Edit - the craziest part is that compressed a 400MB folder (the abandoned profile) to 6MB. I am guessing that they could optimize/compress the data a bit (though I am sure it would require a re-write or big overhaul of the save/load system).

Just found out desura is taking almost 20GB by itself (when all I have installed is Xenonauts from it) so that will free up tons of space. Just have to keep an eye on my Original Sin saves and not use too many slots

The game saves the state of the world; a lot of things to interact with, etc, means a lot of things the game has to keep track of.

There was a compressed save format introduced awhile ago, but a problem on Macs and an issue with Steam itself could corrupt the saves, so the format was reverted back. At the time it was said compression would be re-added when the corruption problems could be solved.

Several people have used symbolic links to get Dropbox to sync their saves between systems.

The saves are relatively compressible. If your inactive profile compressed to 6MB, though, I would guess all the saves were made in the same area, so that files keeping track of other map regions didn't change between saves. In that case, something like 7-Zip can achieve impressive compression ratios, that couldn't be matched with an archive format like zip or a compressed save format (that would have to treat each save separately).

That makes sense - didn't know that compression caused crash issues on some systems. The main reason I was so surprised at the size was due to how early I still am in the game; I can see a large save folder size after many hours and saves, didn't think it would happen so quickly though.

Ah well, I will deal with it. Thanks for the info.