Repacking installers

sterlenejc

Hello guys, I have a question which I couldn’t find the answer to. I have purchased plenty of items from Daz store and other stores as well and they are taking wuite a lot of space. So what I was thinking is extracting zip folders with installers (DIM compatible ones), deleting 3Delight materials, unnecessary files etc and repacking them back with the same name they had before. I reckon that would save me about 30-40% of the space it’s using now. I store my installers on a separate drive and only need them when reinstalling. 

 

Would that work? 

If not, what would be the best way to reduce each items’ file size?

Richard Haseltine

I doubt you'd save that much by deleting the 3Delight materials, the presets are generally small to start with and - if they are initially uncompressed - pack down well in the zips. The bulk of most packs will be textures, both in unpacked files and in not compressing much further, or HD morphs where they are included.

JD_Mortal

You would have to be sure that the materials are actually ONLY used in 3Delight. I would assume that they are ALSO used for the IRAY materials too, if they exist. It is only the material-config files that are specific, which are nothing more than text for the specific file locations. (They are compressed in the installer, down to almost nothing.)

The largest killer of space, in Daz, is all the tiny empty files and duplicate files. Simply setup your hard-drive (or just the "my daz items", folder), to use compression. (It is in the advanced settings if you select a folder or hard drive.)

That will save you about 30-70% of wasted space on your drives. It will throw all the NULL files into a single NULL file, and stack smaller files into a single "Block", up to your sector-size. It is not cryptic compression, it is lossless compression and has no noticable speed issues, other than being faster. (All the small files will no longer be gaps that have to be skipped over, and will all be in less locations. As opposed to being scattered all over the hard-drive, after installs pack them into any available space.)

EG, if a file is only 4 bytes, or bits... and a sector is 1024 bytes... the file actually occupies 1024 bytes on your hard drive, for each of those files. Compressed, using windows drive/folder compression, it will stuff 301, 4 byte files into that whole single sector, only taking up 1024 bytes and freeing-up 308,224 bytes, or 301 sectors, on your hard drive. Daz has TONS of files that small. (Under the standard "sector size", of all hard drives.)

Do a defrag after that... It will open up a LOT of large areas for larger files to fit. Even if it is an SSD. (That is the ONLY time you want to defrag an SSD.)