Moving daz to a new drive
erickchambers5
Posts: 0
in New Users
I sent this question to DAZ tech support but apparantly it's not worth answering. So I'll just go eff myself and ask it here instead.
I want to move daz to a different faster m.2 drive, if I uninstall and reinstall it onto the new drive will all the scene saves be ruined? (not the rendered scenes) the save files (the.duf) will the pathing migrate? or is it all trash?
Comments
When you move the program D/S to a different drive, you will have to reset the pathways in the managers so it can find itself and all the content. Scenes should be fine. I would think worse case scenario you might have to browse for them to open them. Unless there's something terribly different from the original setup to the new setup, AFAIK the scene files should be able to find everything it needs. After all, some products include scene files and the programs load those just fine [normally].
If you keep scripts loaded in the upper menu, those have to be edited in D/S to have the new pathways assigned to them.
All your CURRENT scenes will break, if you don't care no biggy. But if you do then you may want to look into creating a symbolic directory link from the content directory where it is now to the new location on the M2. I just assumed this is windows, linux has symbolic links, not sure about mac.
Scenes will not break as all referebnces are stored as relative locations - as long as the new content directories are selected correctly, and as long as there were no issues like nested content directories before.
If you have Windows 10, one simple way to move most defaults to a new drive is to change the location of your base 'Documents' folder - for example it starts as C:\users\{myself}\Documents, but if you open the "Properties" on it, you (for example) move it to drive F: or X:. In my case, it is on "F:", so then Daz expects to find things in "F:\Documents\DAZ 3D", and so on. Win 10 will even offer to MOVE all of your files to the new location. There are lots of online tutorials on doing this.
You would still need to use the content directory manager to move the 'Public' base to your new F:\Documents.
I do this NOT because of drive speed, but because I don't want data I need to back up on drive C:, after all in a single boring Saturday, one can reformat Windows drive C and reload all application sparkling new! If your personal data is on a second drive, it can get differentially backed up in a way unaffected by Windows Apps always updating and changing their files in trivial ways. In my case, I back drive F up on a pair of external USB drives.