How to handle large amount of content?

Rod Wise Driggo

Well, there have been three things preventing me from purchasing recently:

1) Ever increasing prices
2) Ever increasing load times for figures
3) Space constrains

For 1) I can only react with smarter and more selective shopping (which I already do), 2) was thankfully adressed by Turbo Loader.

But as 3) is more and more an issue for me I thought I might ask people how they handle things. This is mainly targeted towards folks with big libraries (> 5.000 products and TBs of data).

I myself have the following setup (which is more and more a bottleneck):

I use an external 4 TB HDD as file repository. This repo holds all DAZ products I download via DIM. I usually do not delete products after installation but keep the packages on disk for easy and quick uninstallation/re-installation. For each store I have a file structure by vendor. For DAZ I have only the promo images from the store in it. For 3rd party stores I have promos plus ZIPs in it. I install 3rd party stuff via Content Wizard so usually after installation I delete the original ZIPs and only keep and move the ZIP generated by Content Wizard to the DIM packages folder so I can later uninstall/re-install via DIM.

For my working runtime/library I use an external 2 TB SSD. Every product gets installed to that drive. So if necessary I can leave my repo drive at home and only have the working SSD connected to my laptop.

Now to the problem. The 4 TB drive has some space left but the 2 TB SSD is completely full. That means that whenever I want to install new stuff I need to uninstall other stuff first. Which is bad because I like to have everything at hand if I need it and do not want to fire up DIM for installation/uninstallation all the time. Therefore I have i.e. all base figures and most characters I own installed and just their morphs disabled via Turbo Loader.

How do you guys handle things? Bigger drives? Just installing stuff you really use? Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

MelissaGT

I've been going through and reorganizing my library...and cleaning out crap at the same time. I have so much stuff I've collected that is such low quality I can't possibly use it or of a subject matter I will never use that I just uninstall it to clean up space. 

PerttiA

You can install everything on DAZ store and Rendo combined on a 100GB drive.

1. You can mount new drives to folders on that 100GB drive, for example you can mount a new drive to be the "Runtime" folder of the 100GB drive, and an other new drive to be the "Data" folder of the 100GB drive.
This can be done with the tools included in Windows (Computer Management->Disk Management)

2. You can download SysInternals "Junction" from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/junction
With the Junction, you can move folders from one drive to another without breaking the original folder structure.

I have used both for at least four years without one problem. Previously I used to replace drives with bigger ones, but four years ago 2+TB SSD drives cost a fortune and I needed to find another way to increase the size of my drives.

Both methods leave the drives accessible also by themselves, so no need to worry about similar problems as with RAID or compressed drives.

Joe2018

3) Space = my content was first on a 500 GB SSD, than 1 TB, now 2 TB - which is full now

But meanwhile I got a new PC with a better GPU. At the moment I try this way: all install files are on a NAS Drive. When I buy new content, I install it on the new PC second M.2 SSD, test it, if OK an helpful for my current project it remains on the SSD, Otherwise I de-install it for later use. So my "Work SSD" has about only about 100 GB. So it keeps my library small and another nice effect of that: better load times.

I have all content listed in a excel spread sheat with comments for what I can use it later.

NS: sorry for my bad english. It is not my native language.

Torquinox

I'm still a small potato - I suspect my entire library is around 4k products and only consumes 366GB. I have a 1TB SSD C-drive and a 4TB storage drive.  When I have enough content or toward the end of the year, I will add a 2tb SSD drive for Daz library. Newer products do seem to demand a lot more hard drive space. It's bothersome! It sometimes dissuades me from buying here. As you're surely aware, older content and content from other sites tend to demand less drive space. I stick with that where possible. 

evacyn

I have similar issues with storage - my Daz Library shares a 8TB drive with my AE/Premiere work (which collectively can get enormous), so I'm constantly juggling/uninstalling content. I've started to use more cloud storage for my work files but it adds another step.

A quick way I choose what to remove is to sort by installed size in DIM - I found it pretty easy to skim through the list and find stuff I barely or never use.

RL_Media

Personally I only keep stuff that I am likely to use often permanently installed, stuff like scenes, props, vehicles etc I install into an empty library I have mapped when needed for a project. I only keep my people morphs, clothes and poses etc permanently installed, and even don't bother installing niche morphs I might rarely use like centaurs either. They can be loaded into the empty library is well if ever needed as well.