InstallAware

I have recently discovered how InstallAware creates the uninstall and modify folder with a GUID name under the Application Data folder. I really do not like the way this works for one primary reason, it takes up a phenominal amount of disk space. My installation, when uncompressed, is nearly 1 GB. Additionally, it supports multi-instances. You add this together, especially when loading on pre-existing machines that may have limited disk space on the drive where the Application Data folder resides, and all of a sudden we have support issues. And there really isn't much we can say to resolve the issue and it ultimately requires that the disk space is increased which causes even more problems.

I don't know if there is any option here, a way to force the install to use a pre-specified folder or just not provide modify and repair support. Really all I need is the ability to uninstall....I don't want all of this extra baggage on the local drive.

Unfortunatly I think this is a MSI issue; almost all MSI installations that I've seen leave a "cached" copy on your disk somewhere (there are some exceptions though) in order to allow the MSI Engine to do repair operations, maintenance and uninstallation ...

Andy

I guess this is kind of my point, it requires much fewer resources and cached information to perform an uninstall. I understand and agree with having a reasonable amount of cached content to perform an uninstall. However, if my users need to repair or modify, they can resort back to using the CD that I have provided them.

Also, I know that MSI does cache some content....however, I do not think this is MSI doing this but rather InstallAware. I have created some MSI installations outside of InstallAware to see what is cached. There are some removal files by default that are cached, but nothing close to the entire installation.

If you do not want that much of your install cached do not use Web Builds, use an uncompressed build or a single file build.

The reason for the large amount of cached data with a Web Build is so you can provide patches, because if they down loaded it from the Web they don't have access to the original sources.

This really isn't a solution since the uncompressed would require 2 CDs and a basic re-write of the installation since InstallAware doesn't have native multi-CD support. I know that I can write a bunch of stuff to support multiple CDs, but this would be cumbersome and goes back to my previous statement. A single file install in this case would be around 650 MB and take an extremely long time to extract (I know because I tested it). The web extraction doesn't take as long and is less prone to fail on our clients existing hardware since there are many more individually compressed files.

Then I belive you will have to delete the folder under application data after apply install.

I don't have a problem with this....are there going to be any adverse effects when trying to uninstall if I do this? I assume that I just need to delete the sub-folders that house the files and keep the instances.dat, SETUP.EXE, etc. Is this correct?

I think so, but I personally haven't tested this.
I don't think it would be hard for you to test it, I would begin with installing from an uncompressed build and see exactly which files it caches.