NIPM installing and keeping packages twice

[nlhnt]

Hello,

this happens on every machine Windows that uses NIPM, at least in my experience.

NIPM downloads and installs packages twice, reserving twice as much space on precious HDD/SSDs.

I am not sure wether these are symbolic links or not, but they reserve memory either way, at least please take a look at this.

First dir:

Spoiler

C:\ProgramData\National Instruments\NI Package Manager\packages\

Second dir: 

Spoiler

C:\Users\All Users\National Instruments\NI Package Manager\packages\

Please see the attached images.

  

[CL_eisenwr · Accepted solution]

Also for a lot of the NI software, it also has the copies of most of the package contents in the MDF folder (C:\ProgramData\National Instruments\MDF\ProductCache\). You can disable the NIPM caching as mentioned in this Knowledge Article. Personally, I have automated most of our NI install with a batch file that includes a delete of these directories at the end. Only issue would be if the machine does not have internet access and needs to repair; then it might not be able to since the package is not available.

. 

[nlhnt]

Didn't know that was a purposeful action, I will disable the cache.
Thank you for the link! 🙂

[WesW · Accepted solution]

---

@nlhnt wrote:

Hello,

this happens on every machine Windows that uses NIPM, at least in my experience.

NIPM downloads and installs packages twice, reserving twice as much space on precious HDD/SSDs.

I am not sure wether these are symbolic links or not, but they reserve memory either way, at least please take a look at this.

---

Hi,

Just to confirm - those two Windows directories are indeed two names for the same folder, so there is only one copy of the packages. However, that KB is accurate in describing that there are two difference caches - one for packages and one for the old .MSI-based installers. That second cache location will be removed in a future release, so the footprint impact will be reduced.