IT'S TOO BIG (question about culling Install Manager and My DAZ 3D Library files)

billyben_0077a25354

I have noticed recently that my system seemed to be slowing down.  Well, I checked my hard drive tonight and found \I only have about 50 GB left on my main (app/program) 600GB hard drive.  Went looking for the culprets and foudn that my Install manager folder is 140 GB & My DAZ 3D Library  folder is 220GB.  That explains the slow/slugish operation.  The question is what would be the best way to cull the Install manager files and my DAZ 3D Library files.  I have a ton of content that I am not using.and need to remove from my main drive.  I probably need to just flush the whole thing and reformat but I am missing some install discs (my Office 2007 & Paintshop Pro discs in particular) but not ready to go buy new office software yet.  Is there a way to remove content that I have downloaded to install manager while still showing it is installed in DS 4.10?  I know I can use install manager to remove content from DS4.10 that it installed but I will have to manually hunt down and uninstall files that were manually installed from other sites.  Suggestions? 

bytescapes

Install Manager does have an option to "Delete Package Once Installed" (it's a checkbox in the footer of the "Ready to Install" tab). That will delete the downloaded ZIP file as soon as you've successfully installed the content, preventing ZIPs from piling up in your Install Manager folder and taking up space on your drive.

That won't help you with the stuff you've already downloaded (and installed) which is just sitting there in your Install Manager folder. However, I believe that you should be able to delete that manually. Just go into the folder and delete both the ZIP file and the accompanying .dsx file for anything you want to get rid of. The deleted item will reappear in your 'Ready to Download' tab. That's good because if you need to reinstall it, you can just download it again; the downside is that it can sometimes be hard to tell content that you have already downloaded and installed (but then removed from the Install Manager folder) from content that's brand-new.

Another option would be to get an external drive and move one or both of the folders to that, freeing up space on your startup disk. High-capacity external drives are really stupidly cheap these days, and both DAZ Studio and DIM work quite happily with folders stored on external drives instead of on your 'main' internal drive.

billyben_0077a25354

That's why I am thinking aobut flushing the whole thing and either reformatting my current drive or finally breaking down and getting a SSD and start fresh if I can find the box with all of my other software so I can reload my programs.  All of the other content I downloaded from other sites is on my Data Drive so those zips are not on my Content drive.

Padone

Personally I keep one content folder for every project with only the assets I need for that project. This also prevents conflicts among assets. Then I also keep my assets library and project folders in a slow backup disk and only the actual active project loaded in the fast system disk.

This works fine, it's fast for production, easy on hardware and reliable at backup. The DAZ "idea" of keeping a huge online assets library is simply impossible .. it will break in production.

billyben_0077a25354

Well the expirament begins.  I am uninstalling ALL of my content loaded through Install manager except for DS 4.10.  Will then try to manually cull the content isntalled manually form other sites that I no longer want then will reinstall the content I want to keep from Install manager with the "Delete Package Once Installed" option then manually delete the uninstalled packages.  If it works, great, it gives me time to find my discs and save up some money for a significant storage upgrade to a 2TB SSD.  If not then I had to reformat anyway.  Will let you know how it worked.

Inkubo

I wish I had noticed this thread before the experiment began. You could simply copy the contents of the DIM Download folder to another, external drive for backup, then delete all the files in that folder. No need to uninstall anything.

Richard Haseltine

bytescapes said:

That won't help you with the stuff you've already downloaded (and installed) which is just sitting there in your Install Manager folder. However, I believe that you should be able to delete that manually. Just go into the folder and delete both the ZIP file and the accompanying .dsx file for anything you want to get rid of. The deleted item will reappear in your 'Ready to Download' tab. That's good because if you need to reinstall it, you can just download it again; the downside is that it can sometimes be hard to tell content that you have already downloaded and installed (but then removed from the Install Manager folder) from content that's brand-new.

You can delete existing zips from Ready to Install or installed by right-clicking and selecting the Delete package(s) option - either delete a single item you right-click on, or all selected items. This won't, however, cause them to appear in Ready to Download unless they are also uninstalled or are not installed in the first place.

billyben_0077a25354

Well, the expirament worked.  Went from 46.4 GB available to 197GB free.  Removed a bunch of older content that I am not using and used the uninstall option in DIM to delete the un-needed .zip files.