Is it A Good Idea to install Daz and Contents in a Second Drive?
nokoteb99
Posts: 931
I want to do it for backup but also just to install DAZStudio in another drive. is this a good idea ?
Post edited by nokoteb99 on
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Depends what you mean. Since a large content library can easily be upwards of a terabyte, it's very common to install Daz Studio on your main hard drive and your content library on an external hard drive. However, I would not recommend installing it twice, once on each drive, which is what your question implies.
Plenty of people with a lot of DAZ content use external USB HDD or USB SSD. Then they always configure the drive to be a D: drive to make it easier to clean install Windows and DAZ Studio if they need to.
By default, the DAZ Studio installation process puts a lot of folders and presets in default locations on the C: drive in the /username/ folder and elsewhere. I'm no system administrator, but I suspect that installing DAZ Studio elsewhere will result in a bit of confusion. You will very probably have difficulties updating when upgrades are released; DIM and DAZ Central need to know where you've put things. If you're confident that you can sort that out, give it a try. Most people however install the program in its default locations and put the content wherever it suits them. I keep DAZ Studio on my C: drive, install my content on an external hard drive, and tell DAZ Studio where to find it. My only problem so far has been learning to use DAZ Studio, which was designed and programmed by Albert Einstein on one of his bad days.
Despite the overall programming which probably has something to do with that 640K partition deep inside.
The incredible think about studio it will run from anywhere.
Note, I've never installed it on another drive but before I let Daz update... I drag my current studio folder to another drive.
And voila, it runs .. actually once when I was trying to debugs something I ran back to 4.6 (406?) from other drives.
Well I have 415 on the C drive I also have 412 on another drive and often run them at the same time.
I haven't had the issues that assume caused Daz to make the new versions single instance only.
But I'm not saying you should try running multiple dazs unless you have dual xeons and 64g ddr4.
But apparently when you launch studio from another drive it does grab all it needs from the C drive (roaming et al) I do leave the basic library on there and put stuff like morph packages in it but I think it's at a mundane 20g
the other 2000g are spread on two other.
I do break my library into multiple folders --- multiple directories ... by content ... mainly because I can't picture having them all in one folder.
But in this case my daz lib is on C... my busy folders (about 6) are on E because G was down to a couple gigs left out of it's 2tb.
---
so give daz for kudos for being flexible ... but then I haven't backed 415 off to another drive to run it yet.
There are directories and files and database services when you install DAZ Studio that always endup hidden in the hidden user/system AppData folder. Those don't grow to be massive though. The files you should consider installing to an external drive are the DIM and/or DAZ Central "3D model product" install zips and the actual "Content Library" directory when all those zips get installed to. For the DAZ Studio app itself, and other related apps you are petter off installing on the system C: drive.
Also, if you modify Smart Content by adding more catagories or classifying more DAZ Studio product content you need to manually save those in DAZ Studio via CMS dB functions (see them by looking a Content Library Pane and right clicking). You do this if you ever clean install DAZ or Windows. Note: Unless you recategorize Smart Content you don't need to do so. You can't accidently recategorize Smart Content so you'll know if you do.
Finally, clean installing DAZ 3D or Windows will force you to reinstall all DAZ 3D model product zip files you bought (even if the Content Library is in the exact same location as last time) because the CMS dB will not be correct or current and when you install those products CMS dB does get updated. That is why you should save those files locally so you don't have to re-download hundreds and even thousands of products when you clean install DAZ 3D or Windows (or Mac, or so on). The easiest way is to use DIM (DAZ Install Manager) and use the "queue" feature in it.