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Storage Management

Inspecting drives, volume utilization, and managing multi-platform game storage

Storage Management

The Storage view (/storage) in Universal Game Launcher provides a comprehensive storage analytics cockpit. It reveals how your installed games are distributed across physical drives, mounted volumes, and storefront library directories.

⚡ Non-Blocking Background Worker & Plugin Gating

The Storage view is powered by the Storage & Drive Analyzer utility plugin (utility-storage):

  • Instant UI Rendering: Switching to the Storage tab renders the page structure immediately with 0ms blocking time. Heavy disk inspection is dispatched to a background thread pool (tauri::async_runtime::spawn_blocking), streaming metrics in reactively without UI hitches.
  • Platform-Aware Calculation: Only installed titles from enabled platform specifications (Steam, GOG, Epic, Xbox, etc.) are computed. Disabling a platform in Settings → Platforms automatically excludes its titles from the storage footprint.
  • Non-Invasive Safety: Disk usage calculation is strictly read-only and never modifies external launcher storage manifests.

💾 Multi-Drive Capacity Gauges

At the top of the Storage view, Universal Game Launcher visualizes disk utilization across every mounted drive on your system:

  • Drive Capacity Gauges: Visual percentage bars indicating used vs. available gigabytes.
  • Game Footprint vs. Other Data: Differentiates between storage consumed by discovered games and other operating system or user data.
  • Drive Health & Threshold Alerts: Clear visual warnings when volumes are running low on disk space.

🗂️ Library Volumes & Platforms

Below the system drive gauges, games are grouped and filterable by platform origin and storage volume:

Platform Storage Discovery Mechanism
Steam Parses all registered libraries in libraryfolders.vdf and game manifests (appmanifest_*.acf).
GOG Galaxy Queries local Galaxy SQLite DB and install paths for discrete game directory sizes.
Epic Games Reads .item manifests in Manifests/ for install sizes and target directories.
Xbox / Windows Apps Inspects AppX/MSIX package footprints across system and secondary drives.
EA Desktop & Ubisoft Connect Inspects installer registry entries and configured game folders.
Battle.net & Amazon Games Reads client product databases and manifests.
Standalone / ROMs Directly calculates disk usage of manually added executables, directories, and emulator ROMs.

🎮 Game Storage Explorer

  • Search & Filter: Search games by name or filter to titles installed on a specific drive.
  • Sort by Size: Instantly sort from largest to smallest to identify games consuming the most disk space.
  • One-Click Folder Access: Click the Open Folder action to open the game’s local installation directory directly in your operating system’s file manager (Windows Explorer, macOS Finder, or Linux file manager).
  • Uninstall Protocol Trigger: Initiate uninstallation via native client protocol handlers (steam://uninstall/{appId}, com.epicgames.launcher://apps/{appId}?action=uninstall) or official launcher delegation.

🧹 Cache Maintenance in Settings

If you wish to manage the application’s internal data cache and local artwork storage:

  • Navigate to Settings → Storage & Cache.
  • ↻ Refresh Metadata Cache: Re-queries data providers without altering your custom game titles or tags.
  • 🗑 Purge Data Cache: Clears in-memory cache and disk image assets to rebuild fresh thumbnails.

➡️ Next Steps