Modding Tip: Saving Drive Space
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Even with mega terabyte drives today we tend to accumulate tons of crap (pics, videos, music, games, apps) and they fill up quickly. Mechanical drives are still cheap but SSD and M.2SSD (which I use for my OS) are still expensive.
So here is a tip for those running out of diskspace (which can cause drive issues and thrashing on mechanical drives): don't copy tons of game files into your mods folder unless or until you need them.
How many files do you need from the game for a modded installation? One file, one folder. That's right, only one file is essential and that's update.rpf. The necessary folder is for your dlcpacks. What about common.rpf and all those cool x64a.rpf down to x64v.rpf. Nope, none are necessary when you first setup for modding.
When do you need them then? When you start doing replaces or edits - and you should do them to the mod versions rather than the game files. Not often with addons. Just as an example I have 9 mod folder configurations and only 1 uses common.rpf in the mods folder and only 1, my main game, uses 2 x.rpf files (x64e and x64v).
Of course my setup is addon rather than replace heavy, but the bottom line is you don't need to copy 40GBs of files you might never use - wait until you need them instead.
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@JohnFromGWN Also, same logic applies to game dlcpacks. You don't need to copy them all over because if you do that's another 50GB most of which you will never need to modify. So in total you could save close to 100GB of storage, but more likely say 60GB+ in practice