What is the purpose of the '/Library/Occlusion' folder?

As the title implies, I'm curious as to what the exact nature of this folder and its contents is. I've recently been transferring a few of my Unity project folders to my new iMac using an external hard drive, and the file copying process to the iMac from the external hard drive kept getting stuck when 'preparing files to be copied'. I ended up tracking the issue to the '/Library/Occlusion' folder by copying each individual file from one of the projects to a new folder on the iMac, and when it came to copying the '/Library/Occlusion' folder across it became stuck while preparing to copy the file, forcing me to cancel the transfer and force quit/relaunch the finder.

I know there's generally a 'Don't ever touch the Library folder or the very fabric of reality will collapse in upon itself' rule, but I launched the copied project in Unity on the iMac without the Occlusion folder present and everything seems to run fine, which leads me to wonder what Umbra is doing with a folder filled with several million .umbracache files?

So if someone can provide a definitive answer explaining the folder's purpose and what Umbra is planning to do with all of those .umbracache files, it'd do a great deal to satiate my curiosity and quell my concerns that I may have just been forced to remove something important from the project.

Cheers!

 

Depends on whether you count "waiting a long time while textures and models reimport" as an ill-effect, of course... ;-)

 

Ah okay, that's good to know, thanks for the information.

 

Hey Rene, this documentation needs some love: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/BehindtheScenes.html

It claims: "All metadata for assets is stored in the Library folder. As as user, you should never have to alter the Library folder manually and attempting to do so may corrupt the project."

Which I think is somewhat misleading these days since it's perfectly safe (and sometimes recommended) to delete the Library folder if you have .meta files enabled.

 

Excellent, thanks Rene!

Small typo in last para: 'Assetsand'

Should this be qualified with 'since version X.X where we introduced forced .meta files' or similar? (just thinking that some poor 3.x user may read this and cause themselves some severe pain )

 

Great stuff!

Thanks.

 

Out of curiosity, wasn't any way to put all that cache into a zip archive.. having zillions of under 1k files in a directory isn't a good idea.

 

>>Out of curiosity, wasn't any way to put all that cache into a zip archive.. having zillions of under 1k files in a directory isn't a good idea.

1 year later, we still have those zillion 1kb files. This is doing wonders for de-fragging drives and lifecycles of SSDs.

 

This is such a pain in the @$$... Not only is occlusion not working properly, but its now made it near impossible for me to make backup copies of my project folder without having to go through minutes upon minutes of deleting files...

 

I just ran into this devil of a problem. What a pain! This could definitely be managed better then it's current design. 90k files regardless of file size take an enormous amount of time to do anything with.

 

I have 2M files in occlusion folder !

 

files are still there.. 945,293 of them.

 

Is there any fix for this? It is litteraly faster for me to wipe my hard drive and reinstall windows than deleting my Unity Project. what is this madness?

 

Use DOS prompt commands to delete folders


rmdir /s PATH\TO\FOLDER-NAME

without confirmation:
rmdir /s /q PATH\TO\FOLDER-NAME