Making space - what folders can be safely deleted while not affecting LabVIEW?

[ErikL68]

I'm trying to shrink the footprint of my LabVIEW installations on my Surface with its very limited SSD space (256GB). What folders can be safely deleted without impacting LabVIEW?

Some I'm thinking I can safely delete:

• <Root>\NIFPGA (10.2 GB) - I use the Development System with RT/FPGA, but use the Server Farm to compile the FPGA code, and don't use any non-LabVIEW FPGA elements. Do I need this at all?
• <Root>\ProgramData\National Instruments\MDF\ProductCache (8.1 GB) - I suspect I can toss it entirely.
• <Root>\ProgramData\National Instruments\NI Package Manager\packages (8.1 GB) - Another 8.1 GB. Coincidence?

Are these safe to delete or prune?  Are there any others?  And how should things be removed - just by deleting files, or by running an uninstaller?

Thanks,
Erik

[billko]

I'm not sure what folders may be "safe" to remove, but I *do* know that deleting folders instead of uninstalling will be a disaster that you may not be able to recover from.  Unfortunately, uninstalling things VIA NIPM is a PITA.

[Terry_ALE · Accepted solution]

In NI FPGA you can empty the compilations folder.

You could uninstall the Vivado tools since you are using cloud compile.

[ErikL68]

Thanks Bill & Terry,

I'm seeing "NI LabVIEW FPGA Xilinx 14.4 Tools" in NIPM. I'm pretty sure that's what I need to uninstall to shrink the NIFPGA folder, as 10.0 GB of the 10.1 GB is in C:\NIFPGA\programs\Xilinx14_4. A subfolder there is "ISE" so looks like it's Xilinx ISE, not Xilinx Vivado. I'm using some older cRIOs and sbRIOs - is Vivado for the newer systems? Is ISE similarly safe to remove via uninstalling the package in NIPM?

I'm hoping the other two folders in my original post are really caching folders for NIPM and that deleting files from them won't wreck anything but instead might slow installs down should a re-install/repair or install of something that is dependent on any of these be performed. Hopefully someone from NI can chime in.

Regards,
Erik

[crossrulz]

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@ErikL68 wrote:

I'm using some older cRIOs and sbRIOs - is Vivado for the newer systems? Is ISE similarly safe to remove via uninstalling the package in NIPM?

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ISE was the compiler before Vivado.  Vivado came into the NI tool chain in 2014.  Any cRIO or sbRIOs developed after that should already be using a Vivado compiler.  But, since you are using the cloud compiler, you can uninstall both of those.

[crossrulz]

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@ErikL68 wrote:

I'm trying to shrink the footprint of my LabVIEW installations on my Surface with its very limited SSD space (256GB). What folders can be safely deleted without impacting LabVIEW?

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I had a similar experience some 7-8 years ago on several laptops.  The first thing I removed on all of them was the Xilinx tools.  I also went through all of the toolkits that were installed and got rid of all of them that I did not need (several people in my group thought you should just install everything on the NI install disk).  It was entertaining randomly hitting F5 from the "My Computer" and seeing how much space was being freed with each item being removed.  A very large majority of the freed space was from the Xilinx tools being removed.

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@ErikL68 wrote:

Some I'm thinking I can safely delete:

• <Root>\ProgramData\National Instruments\MDF\ProductCache (8.1 GB) - I suspect I can toss it entirely.
• <Root>\ProgramData\National Instruments\NI Package Manager\packages (8.1 GB) - Another 8.1 GB. Coincidence?

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I think the ProductCache is where LabVIEW grabs installers/packages to be put into an installer when you build one.  I'm not quite familiar enough with NIPM's inner workings to make any comments on the other folder there.

[Darren]

I delete the MDF and NIPM caches on my VMs to save space. A disadvantage is that you'll have problems when you need to build Installer and/or Package build specs... I think you'll get prompted for installation media at that time. Same goes for repairing NI product installs.

[ErikL68]

Crossrulz & Darren (the Darren I presume?),

Thanks so much!

Sounds like I'll be uninstalling the Xilinx tools then!

As far as the other "repositories" go - can the storage location be changed somehow?  Maybe a registry setting change or a config file change? It'd be ideal if I could setup a network location to store this stuff (and share the details with our other LV programmers) and just make those settings changes. I also have OneDrive on my machine, and could move them there and then tell OneDrive to not cache them locally, in which case they'll remain available should they be needed, but otherwise won't waste nearly as much space -- I'm not sure how much space OneDrive keeps for non-local files, but I doubt it's more than a few KB. Or can a NTFS Junction / Soft Link be created to move them to a mapped network drive? Has anyone had any luck trying that?

If the location can't be changed, I'll probably just clear them out.

Thanks,

Erik

[Darren]

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@ErikL68 wrote:

As far as the other "repositories" go - can the storage location be changed somehow?

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I wouldn't risk it... almost everybody I know who tries to move NI stuff anywhere other than C:\ ends up having issues. I know one person who swears she has no problems with having all sorts of NI stuff on her D:, but I think she just got lucky. 😛

I guess to step back a sec... why do you have the whole NI stack installed on a Surface Pro? Are you using that for your actual development machine? I've worked with SPs for customer projects before, but the SP is always the end target for the deployed code, i.e. it just has the LV runtime installed to support the built EXE of the app, I never install the whole LV IDE on it.

[WesW]

To add, here is a KB with additional details on both of these caches:
https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019KdtSAE&l=en-US