Thanks for the update.

I guess it is a bit complex to check version number of a patch against that of a non patch installer, and might not work in every case anyway. Personally I'm not that bothered about leaving the patch entries there ... not unless the size of my manifest grows to a point where removal might be desirable to speed things up etc.

Who knows with that last, as I am still mostly entering new manifest entries on-the-fly, and many of my games, probably most, are yet to be imported. I have a ton of updates to get, so that will likely add a large bunch when I get around to it.

Well, I have two separate backups.

I have my real backup on a distributed minio that is on 4 separate machines with ~80TB of redundant disk space (which I don't leave on all the time because of the electricity usage) and I have my slim service single-instance minio with a single 12TB disk that I use as a mirror to download games without having to download games I want to install from gog (and that one I leave on most of the time).

My 12TB service instance was full, but clearing the patch files for a couple of games, I freed 250gb of space (haven't done all the games I could yet, I might be able to double that). I'll probably have to add another disk to that minio, but I'm postponing that as much as I can.

Me, I have four backups in all, and I just keep buying new portable drives as the need arises.
I have them organized very specifically, and so it works well for me. I have them stored in various places around the house and even a copy up in the shed, at some distance from the house.

No doubt I could save quite a bit of space if I removed all unnecessary patches and even updates. I don't have the mindset to bother with that right now, and drives are relatively cheap. I also have three kids to pass things onto one day.

I could have used a NAS, but got turned off them years ago, after trying a 2 Bay Synology for a couple of years. It still works, still has the original two drives in it, full & mirrored, but now I just treat it as one of my movie etc backups, and I rarely turn it on. Unless you are going to run multiple NAS and in very different physical locations, they are just like having all your eggs in one basket to me.

But hey, each to their own. :)