Hello, I am experiencing a storage issue with Drastic Advanced on MuOS. I use an RG34XXSP and noticed that every time I overwrite a save file or save state, several megabytes of storage are consumed beyond what would be expected.
To test this, I noted the available storage space, then played Pokémon SoulSilver for about 30 minutes, making a few normal saves and save states while only overwriting existing ones (no new save files were created). Afterward, I checked the storage again and found that approximately 200 MB had been consumed.
I compared the save and save state files before and after, and they remained exactly the same size. Despite that, the used storage space kept increasing.
It may not seem like much at first, but over time it adds up to several gigabytes. In fact, today I had to reinstall the system because my primary SD card had reached 16 GB of used space solely due to this issue.
That sounds quite unfortunate. The release has been available for several months now without this issue being reported during testing or by other users…
Overwriting an existing save file or save state should not continually consume additional storage if the file size remains unchanged. If the save and state files are exactly the same size before and after saving, then the storage usage increasing elsewhere points to something specific to the card, filesystem, or setup rather than Drastic Advanced creating larger save data.
A few things are worth checking I suppose…
- Confirm if new save states are being created individually rather than overwritten. If settings were changed they may have set to create separate state files per slot or per session, even if it appears that an existing state is being overwritten.
- Check the mSD card itself. Non-genuine or fake cards can report incorrect capacity and may start overwriting or corrupting data once their real capacity is exceeded. This can cause unusual storage behaviour that looks like space is disappearing or being consumed incorrectly.
- Check for filesystem corruption. If the reported file sizes are not changing but used space is still increasing, the filesystem may not be tracking space correctly, is this FAT32 or exFat you are using?
- Flashing the card again should not have been necessary for this specific issue. If the problem was caused by a growing or duplicated file(s), deleting the affected file or folder would have normally be enough. Since they live in the
MUOS/savedirectory.
As I am unsure of what the actual issue is and not something I can replicate, I would check the save/state folders directly after each save action and verify whether any new files appear, including hidden files if possible. It would also be worth testing with a known genuine mSD card that has been fully verified for capacity.
I always buy my SD cards from official retailers, so I don’t think that’s the issue. I ran another test: I configured the saves to be stored on SD2, opened Drastic Advanced again, made several save states in slot 1 so they would overwrite the existing ones, and then closed the emulator. After that, an extra 100 MB had been used on SD2. I checked the folder and everything looked normal, there weren’t even any hidden files.
I think I’ll search how to change the screen aspect ratios in Drastic Legacy and start using that