'Real weather' and disk space

[Nav]

Hoping from some advice from someone who knows more about 'puters than I do.

I prefer to fly with 'real weather', often with updates.  But I've noticed that, once I've downloaded it, I can start another flight on the same date, even months later from a different airport in a different country with a different aeroplane, and the 'real weather' for that date comes up again.

My question is, does this mean that, every time the computer downloads the real weather or an update, the whole lot (Jeppeson weather data for every region and airport, worldwide, at maybe fifteen-minute intervals) gets permanently saved on my hard disk?

Much as I love FS2004, it takes up a lot of disk space already.  I'd hate to think that I am ALSO loading it up with a comprehensive record of worldwide weather, every time I fly.  If I am, it must amount to a helluva lot of bytes.

So does FS automatically delete it after a while?  Or, alternatively, is there a file or cache that the weather is saved in, that I can clear from time to time?  

[papa-metro]

My understanding is that the wx goes into RAM, random Access Memory and is automatically deleted at each session end, or computer shut down
papa-metro usaf 1953-57

[garymbuska]

I do not know about real world weather but I have notcied that the system will save the last flight you flew along with the weather for that flight. I usually just open the folder and delete these flights. I am not sure if there is a way you can either prevent this or have a option to not save these flights.
But when you restart FS it does not load that weather.
The only time it will do this is when you start your default flight it will use that weather at the time you saved it. So when you restart FS with the default flight it will use the weather from the last time you saved the flight and made it the dfeault flight.

[MattNW]

Can't say with certainty but my guess is that what weather that the sim saves is saved in a file similar to a database. You can cram a lot of info into a relatively small file that way since it's mostly just numbers. Maybe a couple Mbytes or so should cover just about everything.

[Nav]

Thanks for the advice, papa, gary, Matt  :)  I did a bit of 'Windows Exploring' and I think that you are ALL right.

I found a file on the C: drive - in 'My Documents', not the FS9 folder - entitled 'Flight Simulator Files'.  In it, as far as I could tell, were all my flightplans and all my saved flights (I tend to save quite a few).

Looking at 'Properties', I found that the 'weather' flight files were a lot bigger than the ordinary ones - by a factor of ten or more.  One I checked was 250KB against 12KB for the average 'ordinary' flight.

So, papa, I expect that, as you say, weather normally goes into RAM only - but, as gary says, saving the flight means that the weather (at least the weather 'in force' at the time of saving) gets saved as well.  

The really good news is that the whole folder, with a couple of years worth of saved flights and flightplans, is only 437MB - so, as Matt says, we're not talking about vast amounts of data, even if you're a compulsive flight-saver like me  :)  And you can reduce the load at any time, just by deleting some saved flights.

Thanks to all of you - a great relief!