DELETE
daveso
Posts: 7,181
DELETE
Post edited by daveso on
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
DELETE
you eed a ew keyboard
There are programs (and accessories) that can be used to copy the OS to another drive, but there are also programs that help you expand you current drive to hold all the data in the universe.
Sysinternals Junction belongs to the latter category and doesn't even cost a thing;
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/junction
I have used it for maybe 3 years and not one problem with it.
In general, I use C-drive only for the OS, programs are installed on D and the rest of the 14 drives are for my own stuff and material that has accumulated over the 30+ years.
Reserving the C-drive for the OS comes from, "Where is the problem when it occurs?" followed by "Do you really want to hunt down your important files amongst tens of thousands, uncategorized wastefiles with a recovery tool?"
of course it's possible.. you just need to clone the HD and restore it elsewhere. you can do it by using some windows software (macrium reflect, acronis) or with a linux live boot distro that has insiede GParted, the most common and easy to use or Clonezilla
I'd recommend keeping your OS separate. That way if (and when) you need to wipe it and start over with a fresh install of Windows, you don't lose everything else along with it. I have mind on an independent 250GB SSD. It's a constant battle with telling Daz not to use "documents" as a temp stop, but that usage is minimal. I also have to clean out my downloads folder frequently, but that's also a good housekeeping habit to have anyways.
For cloning I've used many tools mentioned by @brvsn but Acronis is the simplest ans if you have any Crucial hardware is free
https://www.acronis.com/en-sg/promotion/CrucialHD-download/
Even if I'm not cloning a crucial SSD I have an old 64gb drive I can attach via USB to pass the check
I would also reiterate that you should split your OS from other work. I use a fairly fast but bog standard 256 or 128 OS SSD and then install everything on other drives.
Daz likes to use OS drive public user for it's files and will just use symbolic links to my other drives.
mklink /J "C:\Users\User\Documents\DAZ 3D\Studio" "X:\Studio"
mklink /J "C:\Users\Public\Documents\My DAZ 3D Library" "X:\My DAZ 3D Library"
I've actually done this. I trasnferred a 500GB NVME drive to a 1TB NVME drive with Paragon Disk Manager. (It did require a PCIE NVMY board to hold the second drive). It's not that hard and it leaves your old drive alone, so if it doesn't actually work you can just put your original drive back in and try again.
Seagate and WD drive also include a free (feature-reduced) version of Acronis True Image. ATI has never failed me, unlike even some of the highly-rated alternatives.
I've bought several "Crucial SATA SSDs" in the last 6 months. They all came with a free proprietary version of Acronis TrueImage for cloning your drives to the purchased Crucial brand drive. Same thing for the few "Samsung NVMe, and SATA SSDs" that I've bought recently. Seems everybody wants to give you the means to clone to their drives and none others.
But if everybody's playing the game then nobody loses.
But Acronis is on the minds of many new potential customers.
DELETE
You can actually have your default documents folder moved to a different drive as well, I just forgot (again) how I managed that, but it is certainly possible. These days, I have my C drive exclusively for Windows and 2 or 3 programs I use a lot, the rest of my programs are on another drive, while all data (documents, assets, images, browsercache, etc.) is stored on some older drives (both internal and external) I frankensteined from previous computers. Though I plan to replace those last ones with an 8TB external drive that should last me for several years.
I just did this. I bought a external drive enclosure that would accept a 3.5 drive or a SSD drive. You do have to initialize the drive (i think that is the term) before windows will see it.I think I went into Computer Management to do it.And possibly format the drive although the clone will over-write it. I used Macrium Reflect to clone it. Took about an hour. Then I just swapped out the drives and booted up.
You can also buy a scsi to usb adapter and clone it that way. This was much slower for me than the external drive enclosure.
Afterwards, you might have to attended to a program or two. Macrium Reflect wasn't doing the backups anymore because the drive didn't match the backups. I just had to modify the backup job so it would use the new drive. I think that was the only program that complained.
DELETE
It's taken me a couple of years of thinking about it, and partial attempts, failures, re-attempts. I've finally got all my DAZ data divorced from my account folder and off my system drive. Even the "temp" files. I never use "smart content" or whatever DAZ is currently pushing as intelligent data management so I had none of that stuff to tinker with. Just basic content files, render library, temp files, etc. I did this because trying to do system backups of the system partition took forever with my bazillions of DAZ content files in my personal folders. Now, like others have said, my system partiton is relatively clean and easy to get a "sys image" of. My personal files are backed up automatically by Microsoft quickly because not that much ever changes. But backup of my huge DAZ partitions are handled manually in a group of their own. Maybe someday I'll "RAID" them but for now, I just keep two backups of the DAZ library partition as well as the original DAZ downloaded content files.
I don't remember the details, but I recently replaced the main Windows 250 G SSD with a 1TB SSD. The new one was a samsung and I used a samsung tool to do the copy, but I think I just downloaded it from the web using a URL listed on the single page doc that came with the disk. The machine booted just fine from the new disk. Never had to re-authorize or enter any product key. If memory serves, though, there were a couple of options and only one would do the trick. So, pay attention as you go.
+1 for Clonezilla, open source, free, easy to use...
You can do this with Pictures, Music, and so on too.