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Unexpected Opportunities

DaikatanaDaikatana Posts: 830
in The Commons

Something just occurred to me this morning.  The G8.1 release may give me an opportunity to clear out my content library a bit. Like many of us, I have content in my library that I have not used in literal years.  Specifically most of the Genesis and G2 characters and lots of their clothing and hair.  G3 and G8 are just so much better. Perhaps now is the time to convert the things from those generations to G 3 or G8 where possible, back up my library and then use DIM to uninstall the the stuff I will not be using( while still saving the install packages) and end up with a streamlined "working library"?  I'm pretty certain others in the community have done this before.  Does anyone have any ideas or advice they would like to pass on so that I dont mess this up royally and end up having to spend hours rebuilding everything because I made a stupid mistake somewhere?

Comments

  • srieschsriesch Posts: 4,241

    When making the decision, carefully consider the possibility that you might change your mind in the future, and how much work would it be to redo it vs. what you gain by cleaning it out.  There's stuff I KNEW I would never use and dumped in the trash bin because I didn't use those figures or it was poser content but I'm using DS or I had a better version of it now or whatever.  Then years later figure conversion tools became available that would allow limited use of content for a different figure on the figures I did use, so now I'm going to have to go back and try to find all that.  Then I learned that some of the poser content that I thought was poser-only was actually useable in DS, or even required behind the scenes, and had to retrieve some of that.  Then I realized that sometimes newer versions break older content and it's good to have options just in case, and sometimes the low resolution duplicates are actually handy for background scene filler because they can use less resources.  And so on.  There's lots of content I was wrong about never wanting to use, but was unable to correctly predict because at the time of abandoning it I was 100% convinced otherwise.   If it doesn't hurt to keep it around, that might not be a bad idea.

  • HylasHylas Posts: 5,070

    Daikatana said:

    Perhaps now is the time to convert the things from those generations to G 3 or G8 where possible, back up my library and then use DIM to uninstall the the stuff I will not be using

    Don't converted items still use the same textures? Which would be deleted from your Runtime when you uninstall the original item?

  • DaikatanaDaikatana Posts: 830

    Hylas said:

    Daikatana said:

    Perhaps now is the time to convert the things from those generations to G 3 or G8 where possible, back up my library and then use DIM to uninstall the the stuff I will not be using

    Don't converted items still use the same textures? Which would be deleted from your Runtime when you uninstall the original item?

    My thought is that I would copy and paste the texture to the directly where the converted item goes. Just use the same structure as the content library already does by nesting the folder?

  • DaikatanaDaikatana Posts: 830

    sriesch said:

    When making the decision, carefully consider the possibility that you might change your mind in the future, and how much work would it be to redo it vs. what you gain by cleaning it out.  There's stuff I KNEW I would never use and dumped in the trash bin because I didn't use those figures or it was poser content but I'm using DS or I had a better version of it now or whatever.  Then years later figure conversion tools became available that would allow limited use of content for a different figure on the figures I did use, so now I'm going to have to go back and try to find all that.  Then I learned that some of the poser content that I thought was poser-only was actually useable in DS, or even required behind the scenes, and had to retrieve some of that.  Then I realized that sometimes newer versions break older content and it's good to have options just in case, and sometimes the low resolution duplicates are actually handy for background scene filler because they can use less resources.  And so on.  There's lots of content I was wrong about never wanting to use, but was unable to correctly predict because at the time of abandoning it I was 100% convinced otherwise.   If it doesn't hurt to keep it around, that might not be a bad idea.


    Good thought.  External drives are relatively inexpensive these days.  Maybe I should just use DIM to create a second library on another drive. Then I just have to connect the older library when I need something from it?

  • HylasHylas Posts: 5,070

    Daikatana said:

    Hylas said:

    Daikatana said:

    Perhaps now is the time to convert the things from those generations to G 3 or G8 where possible, back up my library and then use DIM to uninstall the the stuff I will not be using

    Don't converted items still use the same textures? Which would be deleted from your Runtime when you uninstall the original item?

    My thought is that I would copy and paste the texture to the directly where the converted item goes. Just use the same structure as the content library already does by nesting the folder?

    But what's the point in doing all that? If it's about saving disk space, the textures use up the most space.

    Not that I want to keep you from cleaning up your Runtime. I'm actually going to do something similar. My new PC should arrive sometime soon-ish and I'll be taking that as an opportunity to do some major house cleaning.

    I just don't think uninstalling content that you're still going to use (in converted form) makes much sense.

  • SevrinSevrin Posts: 6,310

    Unless your bandwidth is restricted, I don's see the harm in uninstalling purchased items you can just download again later.

  • NylonGirlNylonGirl Posts: 1,937

    I basically uninstalled everything except the stuff from Renderosity. Then when I click on a character I have saved as a scene subset, or click on a whole scene, there is a window that pops up and tells me what items are missing. Sometimes it lists missing items that aren't even part of the scene... It has an option to install the items but, if I care, I install them from the Daz Install Manager instead. Then I click "Skip" in the DAZ window and the scene loads with the newly reinstalled items. So it's like I uninstalled everything and can reinstall it if I suddenly use it again. I can't do that with the stuff from Renderosity because it won't tell me what products are missing. It would just tell me what files are missing. And then I'd have to figure out what products go with those files. At least that's how I think all of this went.

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