How to reclaim the ~600mb of wasted by libreoffice 6 space on the system drive?

halloo · January 9, 2020, 11:17pm

The installer was saying it will take like 60mb for extra things like english dictionary, yet the “spaces” tab showed that it will eat away the same amount of ~600mb on the system drive along with ~600mb on the main drive, which it annoythingly has done.
The funny part is that after windows reinstall the old package of libreoffice was working pretty much like a portable installation, without that ~600mb of system drive data. But I decided to update

How to reclaim that 600mb of wasted space from the system drive since evidence shows that it clearly isn’t that essential?

ve3oat · January 10, 2020, 1:14am

Wow! Hard to believe. Have you tried defragmenting your drive? Or cleaning up with something like CCleaner or Glary Utilities?

mikekaganski · January 10, 2020, 7:37am

The funny part is that after windows reinstall the old package of libreoffice was working pretty much like a portable installation

Do you mean that you had some massive system reconfiguration in the past, which made your pre-existing LibreOffice installation orphaned (but still working), and then you used LibreOffice installer to “add” some components onto another drive (C:?) - which ignored your old orphaned installation (on D:)?

In case a system upgrade corrupts system’s installation database keeping track what was installed where and how, there’s nothing LibreOffice (or its installer) could do. It simply didn’t know of an older installation; it honestly shown you that it will need 600 MB on your chosen drive; and that 60 MB of that would be the component you highlighted to inspect. The data on your other drive is most likely obsolete and might be simply removed.

halloo · January 10, 2020, 10:48pm

D:\ had an “orphaned” installation that was still usable, C:\ was formatted.

I’ve removed the “orphaned” installation (just deleted the folder from D:\ ) and installed the newest available version to D:
what annoys me is that it has also taken ~600mb from C:\ along with the ~550mb installation to D:\

halloo · January 11, 2020, 1:31pm

@ve3oat this is specific to libreoffice installation. And yes I know about ccleaner and degragmentation.

mikekaganski · January 11, 2020, 2:08pm

Could you please tell what is the contents of C:\Program Files\LibreOffice, C:\Users<YourUserName>\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice, and D:<LibreOfficeInstallLocation> (all with their total sizes)?

halloo · January 11, 2020, 11:01pm

@mikekaganski I’ve performed a full C:\ search for “libreoffice” and couldn’t find anything of large enough size; the Roaming folder I’ve moved to D:\ so the libreoffice folder there wasn’t contributing to the size taken from C:\ . The D:\ installation was about ~550mb.

Anyway. I haven’t found a solution so I just uninstalled libreoffice, which has cleared the space from C:\ as well as (obviously, since it was the target of the installation) from D:\ .

I’ve moved to the actual portable version (though it is an older buggier version), that doesn’t eat up anything, but the ~536mb main folder, which is exactly the predictability I want.

mikekaganski · January 12, 2020, 9:49am

LibreOffice installer for Windows (MSI) writes to these locations (drive C: is assumed the system drive below):

Most files go to install location - that is C:\Program Files\LibreOffice by default, and is customizable on Custom Setup step of installation wizard.
Fonts: about 70 MB goes to C:\Windows\Fonts
System components used by LibreOffice: installer runs MSU for UCRT and merge module for MSVC - in total, about 3 MB files go to C:\Windows\System32 (if not yet present).

That’s all that MSI does. Now there is also one thing that Windows Installer service does itself for own needs: it caches the MSI into C:\Windows\Installer hidden folder. Given the size of LibreOffice MSI, it takes ~300 MB.

So for installation on another drive, it would be normal for install process to take size of installer plus slightly more than 70 MB on system drive after the installation finishes. That is confirmed by direct measurement I did when testing this on a dedicated clean VM with Win7SP1 and 2 virtual disks: took “space used on drive” before and after installation, and also before and after removal.

The different thing is what installer tells in “Disk Space Requirements” dialog. And that indeed shows it needs almost 600 MB space on system drive when installing on another drive. But that number doesn’t mean that it will actually take all that space after installation finishes: it’s just the free space needed in the process of installation (e.g., for temporary files created in Temp directory; for undo information kept while installing to enable rollback on installation error in hidden C:\Config.Msi, etc.), which is cleared at the end of the process. So that number indicates the space without which installation cannot proceed successfully.

By the way, removal of that cached MSI from Windows\Installer is not a good idea, because it would make clean uninstallation of programs impossible without the original MSI at hand.