Interesting, gotcha. I guess if you really thought it might be worth the effort, you might trace how the gog downloader handled it properly, but I'm inclined to guess that it just didn't, so that would be a waste of effort. ;-)

Maybe if you get a "bad" chunk, you grab a few more, and if those fail you update the checksum data for the whole file, and if the start of the already downloaded part doesn't match, just start again on fetching that file? Sorry, I may not have thought that out properly, and you probably have already... Alternatively, you may share my distaste for "hacks". :-)

I didn't try. I did a full a couple of weeks ago. I'll do another one in a month or so. I don't do it too often, as it's a lengthy process (a few hours).

My view, is that if you have the money to buy lots of games, then you should wisely spend some of it on a backup drive or three.

For sure, but if you backup as you buy, it is not that onerous ... unless you maybe buy 20+ games all at once.

Obviously, but if you really care and are diligent, you will spend some of the money you spend on games on a backup hard drive, at least one. It's not that hard or expensive to stay on top of it all. If it is, then maybe you are spending too much on games.

Honestly, I cannot see the difference between doing that and using Steam ... you remain reliant on an internet connection. Kind of defeats the purpose of using GOG to my mind.

Well if they don't care, that is their choice. But if they later change their mind, well what can i say ....

Alas, some cannot be relied on to use common sense. So if I provide them a means to abuse the system and impact myself and others, and even GOG, then I feel it my duty to limit that.

Well each to their own, and I wasn't really referring to those who are mostly up-to-date, just those that suddenly find themselves with a huge number of games to download.

I am guilty myself of leaving updates until I feel ready to manually deal with them. Alas that means I often have to re-download a complete game in some cases, because patch continuity has been broken.

For me, there is more to life than keeping up with updates, and I spend enough of my time GOG focused as it is. It does however really piss me off that GOG don't allow you access to their archive, to get older patches especially.

My PC is always busy doing something, and one major reason I switched to gogcli.exe is that I can just get my games etc on demand, and not have my PC spending hours updating the manifest. I build the manifest on-the-fly, and then update a game entry at need. My list also indicates which games have been updated recently, as per when I last synced the Games list, which is every time I make a purchase ... immediately afterward. That is of course relying on GOG markers, and I also keep a full record, as GOG remove the markers in some scenarios.

Alas with GOG, it is an imperfect situation, and we need to make up for their shortcomings, as best we can.

Another way I do that last, is to keep a record of every file I download, in a separate database, so that links and MD5 detail is not lost with a manifest update. And because I keep my game library on external drives and not on my PC, it is also what gets checked when determining what I already have downloaded. That means files I already have, get stripped from the download list automatically.

Not everyone has the same workflow. I for example have gogrepo on a Synology NAS, automatically updating my library weekly and full once a month. The first time I downloaded my library it took 5+ days.

Just wanted to show how much the -skippatches feature could help me as someone with a 777 game big collection. I did a deep dive into my archive and found a number. Personally since I'm using GOGREPOC I don't need patches for my games and would rather skip grabbing them. There are a few hold outs that have not combined them into the full installer but I run this enough I'll eventually grab them so its not a concern.

So with a catalog of 777 games my Patch file size is exactly: 449GB which is pretty insane. Cybeprunk and Everspace are my biggest space hogs at the moment.

Here is to giving some incentive to add the ability to skip patch files, also cheers for keeping this going all these years Kalanyr you are amazing!

And the XML edits worked like a charm!

True, and each of us that care, often have a different approach.

I used gogrepo.py initially myself, and it took something like 5 hours on this slow PC and connection, to get the full manifest, with the mandatory all at once method. My game library may well be double the size now ... certainly at least a third larger.

I prefer the build as you go method, that gogcli.exe provides.

Sounds like you have things setup nicely for yourself.

Often it is about conditions on the ground. Having a suitably large NAS for instance and leaving it on all the time I guess, and being happy to have all your games on it, in the default storage structure used by gogrepo. I prefer otherwise.

I have seen quite a few games that update a few times in a month, so those checking only once a month could well find that patch continuity has been broken.

The problem is that there apparently are some games where the latest version is in the patch, and the base installer is not the latest version. And IIRC also some game(s) where the "patch" was more like DLC, new content, IIRC.

So in some cases you'd still want to download the patches too. I guess I keep downloading "everything" now, and years from now if and when GOG is no more, or I've stopped visiting the site anymore, I'll weed out the unnecessary files myself at that point.

Heck, I might even repackage at least the biggest games at that point, to take out non-English language versions etc. Anything but actually installing and playing the games of course because where's the fun in that?

Isn't that.. way too frequent? O_o
I recall Kalanyr said to use gogrepo sparingly to not stress Gog's servers (expecially during sales).
I run it like 3 times a year..

I came to terms with not having the ABSOLUTE complete capture of all of my games at any given moment a while ago.

Just base installers and DLC (ones that are not labeled as patches anyway)..manuals.. Soundtracks... (no videos) and my collection takes nearly 3TB on my NAS. and let's face it.. I'll never hand pick patch installers to delete for 900+ titles..

It's not an issue of being complete "at any given moment". There are games where the patch has content not found in the main installer --- and this has been so for years now, so is extremely unlikely to ever change. For example, "The Witcher 3", where the main installer is version 1.31 (a) from February 2017, while the patch is version 1.32 from October 2018.

Wow, and I had plans to trim the patches from my games to save some space by looking for patterns in the url to identify patches (I noticed that unlike installer names, urls tend to follow a stricter convention).

I won't be doing that now. Thanks for that bit of info.

The thing is that if you wait until you got 200+ games to update, you will help saturate their CDN for several hours while you download everything.

Here's something that you can do as a compromise: Update often, but don't always re-generate your entire manifest (an operation that is more taxing on the gog servers given the volume of requests it entails). Most of the time, just pick what gog indicates has updated in your library and update this.

Once in a while, re-generate your entire manifest and see what changes gog did not report, but don't routinely do this.

Update is not really the stressing operation; download is.

I do a regular update (i.e. flagged games) whenever I notice a GOG flag, which could easily be several times a day. I do a full update about once or twice a month.

I never do a full download (unless my HDD dies).

Its a different kind of stress. Downloading will stress the throughput of their cdn.

Games metadata requests will stress their regular servers and depending on how much they rely on caching, potentially their databases (or otherwise their cache layers... caching layers like redis are orders of magnitude more performant than a regular sql database, but they still have limits).

And the volume of requests needed to generate your entire manifest when you got thousands of games is significant.

I mean, you got the requests to get the summary (few, that would be about 20-30 requests for my collection, one per page), then you have at least one request per game (close to 2500 requests for my collection) and like at least 3 requests per game file for their download dance (that would be about 10000-30000 requests for my collection).

For my collection, that would be tens of thousands of requests. No question that GOG's api is not optimally designed at all for this (and that's on them), but the problem remains.

Given that MaGog collected hundreds of pieces of information on every single one of the thousands of games in GOG's catalogue every six hours for more than six years with rarely a noticeable effect, I consider the stress created by a full update utterly negligible.