Can you run DS on an external hard drive?
Wonderland
Posts: 7,046
in The Commons
My C drive is full and now my D drive is almost full. Can you run DS from an external hard drive? And if so, would I have to move the manifest file and other things, preferences, etc..? Thanks.
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Yes. Preferences and so on can stay in default install location. All you do is move your content library to the external drive and, assuming you always connect to it with the same drive label, Daz will work with it. Simply copy/paste (safer than cut!) it and tell Daz where it is (Add Base Directory... on right-click menu in the Content Library).
Not the content library, but the app itself and manifest files.
If you look in Install Manager, there's a little cog far top, right of the dialog. Click it and there's a menu. The second item on that menu is Advanced Settings. In there there's an Installation tab, which amongst other things contains paths to the manifest archive and software itself.
Yes, I know, I meant will it RUN CORRECTLY on an external hard drive. Will it have enough power to run. I want to move EVERYTHING to an external hard drive. .
Assuming it's USB 2.0 or USB 3.0, and of course caveat emptor with respect to your CPU (it's not an old 286), it'll be fine. Access to content on an external drive (USB 2 or 3) will be as fast as an HDD and you're unlikely to notice any difference in performance. I would say try it and see.
I tried moving the manifest files to the D drive and pointed DIM to the new location and now DIM doesn't work at all, shows nothing new to download and nothing ready to install. Going to put it back in default location. Not sure why it wouldn't work unless I have to create the same path of users/public documents/Daz/Install Manafer on the D drive? I just made a folder on the D drive and pointed DIM to it but it broke DIM.
Rather than move it, I think the idea is to uninstall everything, point the paths to the new location and then install everything again.
It took three days to install everything the first time! Can't go through that again.
Check DIM's basic settings and make sure the paths match.
I did try to run Studio in the external once back on the first DS 4 itineration and the shaders weren't working correctly. I haven't tried since.
COPY the files to your external drive. Run Daz. Change the paths. Exit Daz. Remove the files from your C drive. Run Daz again and you should be good to go.
I have everything on an external 4 terabyte drive and it's working with no issues except loading the files is a bit slow. Sadly, I'm running out of space on my 4 terabyte drive as well and it is used ONLY for Daz stuff.
I have my Daz content external...500gb...and the application on the main drive. In my case, the application is 0.2% of my total install, so leaving that on the main drive was not an issue (like 1gb?) I would leave everything but the app, as that is easy-peasy (copy the content dir, set it up in ds to verify, then delete the old) At least that way you get a ton of room freed up, and can then decide on the small percentage of the actual application in Program Files. (if it is worth it)
I already have my content on an external hard drive but just wanted to move the Daz App. I moved it to the D drive, screwed everything up, moved it back to C and I now DIM is not connecting to my account. It has everything that was already installed fine but can't connect to the Daz store to download new files. Ugh. I uninstalled and reinstalled DIM several times and keeps moving me to offline! I can download manually from the website and install through DIM but I need to connect to the store, I have a ton I haven't downloaded yet!
Yes you can run studio from an external drive. With my last laptop I ran Studio from an external D: drive and my content from an external E: drive without any issues at all. Now that I have a new computer I still run my content from an external hard drive.
When running out of space on the "Content drive", the easiest solution is to use Sysinternals Junction to move the texture-folders elsewhere. The original folder structure is not changed in anyway and DS still thinks the texture-folder has not moved anywhere.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/junction
I have been using Junction for at least two years without any problems.
There should be no problem with changing paths in DIM. I have my DIM Downloads (ZIPs and Manifests) on an external HDD and the installes (library) on an external SSD. Works without a problem.
I'm not sure that's even necessary — it's been a while, and it was in a much earlier version of D|S, but I used to have all my content on one external drive, except for the /runtime/textures/ folder, which was on another external drive. All I had to do was make sure both locations were properly linked in Content Directory Manager. This was just a temporary arrangement, after a while I was able to buy a multi-GB external and copied everything to that.
As I understand you can more DAZ folder from program files anywhere you like it should work.
but Daz only takes about 1GB of space. so it won't give that much benefit.
the problem is that Daz also puts some data in AppData folder which is on your C drive and I don't see any way to move it.
looks like you can move CMS folder(used by content manager) but it is rather small
I can recommend a dirty hack to do everything by creating symlinks to the other location. this should work without any problems but your installation will not be portable and you will not be able to move everything to another PC (unless you create symlinks there as well).