Repacking BSAs, good or bad idea?

[Gramblosh]

After DLing UOP and some basic replacers, I thought about repacking Oblivion (SI) BSAs with updated files from these mods, not so much for performance, mainly to keep the basic things separated from the stuff changing more often and keep the HDD less cluttered with lots of small files. Should make updating these things easier. Could also be a benefit when using MOM cause I only have to copy the updated BSAs to each profile (or maybe even share them between the profiles) instead of updating each profile. That was at least my thinking.

Did anybody here try this (I am kinda sure somebody did)? Good idea, bad idea? Anything I should keep in mind when doing that? And how about merging BSAs for e.g. Shivering Isles into one instead of four.

So, my plan is:

1. unpack original BSA (e.g. textures)
   
2. add UOP files
   
3. add basic replacers
   
4. clean and optimize where possible
   
5. set timestamp to something early (e.g. 2000-01-01)
   
6. repack BSA
   

Help, advice, thoughts appreciated. Thanks

Edited November 4, 2012 by Gramblosh

[Hanaisse]

It's a lot of work, but if you feel this is something you need to do, I suggest you read this thread carefully. It talks about what you want to do and has a lot of good advise.

Of particular help is post #6 - Arthmoors little guide on how to do it, and post #12 - discussion of BSAOpt utility.

[Gramblosh]

Thanks, that sounds pretty much like what I was planning to do.

The need... at the moment in particular my textures folder is kinda doubling the texture BSAs, so I could actually unpack it, wouldn't make such a big difference. That makes all kinds of changes really complicated. My two Oblivion installs are about 40000 files each (about 30000 of them being textures) so getting rid of a few thousand files (guess half of those files are dupes) would be nice for my HDD.

[AddammusSubtractius]

I personally prefer to unpack BSA files in the data folder.  The uncompressed files offer a slight improvement in performance, but more importantly, it's easier to make changes -add and remove, or update mods, without having to recompress the BSAs every time.  

 

As for changing the file dates - I think that only applies to esp, and esm files for load order.  Mesh, texture, and sound file dates have no significance (correct me if i'm wrong)

[Tigersong]

That would be weird- making Oblivion, which was made in 2006, think it had files dating back to 2000. o.O

[AddammusSubtractius]

That would be weird- making Oblivion, which was made in 2006, think it had files dating back to 2000. o.O

2000 would be ok, just don't try seting your file dates to something like 1E 25.... the game might not like that.