DIM Manifest File Archiver

JonnyRay

Well, it happened. The drive where I store all my DAZ Installer files failed. My library was still okay, but DIM and Daz Central both thought that NONE of my 8519 packages had been installed. I tried a few things, but in the end, I just had to re-download everything (exceeding my ISP bandwidth for the month; so that's going to be a costly mistake).

To try to head this off from happening again in the future, I wrote a simple Windows PowerShell script to backup my Manifests. My plan is to run this after each new content install. I chose to date/time stamp the archive just on the off case that one of the manifests were to get individually corrupted and I wanted to recover a specific file.

To use this...

1. Create the folder where you want the backup files to go
2. Find where DAZ Install Manager is putting it's Manifests
   1. Open DIM
   2. Advanced Settings
   3. Installation Tab
   4. Manifest Archive
3. Copy the code below and paste it into a new text file in Notepad
4. Modify the variables in the first two lines to indicate where your DIM Manifests are stored and where you want the backup files to go
5. Save the file as a PS1. For example, I saved it on my desktop as "DIMManifestArchive.ps1"
6. To run it, right-click on the file and choose "Run with PowerShell"

---

$DIMManifests = "E:\Daz3D\InstallManager\ManifestFiles"

$BackupFolder = "C:\DAZManifests"

$now = Get-Date

$archive = $BackupFolder + "\ManifestFiles_" + $now.tostring("yyyyMMdd-HHmm") + ".zip"

Compress-Archive -Path $DIMManifests -DestinationPath $archive

alan bard newcomer

JonnyRay said:

Well, it happened. The drive where I store all my DAZ Installer files failed. My library was still okay, but DIM and Daz Central both thought that NONE of my 8519 packages had been installed. I tried a few things, but in the end, I just had to re-download everything (exceeding my ISP bandwidth for the month; so that's going to be a costly mistake)
----I thought my K drive was gone a week ago... (turned out the data plug had popped loose) but 99% of the package files are also on the one of the 12TB backups. 
At a 100g limit per month I could never rebuild those from scratch. Not to mention all the other 3d that would be much more complex. 
Actually time to figure out how to finance another fresh backup drive.... 8TB seem to be about $150.. or the cost of a couple daz bundles. 
should back up *in my case" all my daz libraries and install files. 
But thanks for the headup went and checked the manifest folder and decided to copy all 450m off to another drive.. and then thought "might as well just copy the entire Install Manager folder out of documents. Whoops 37GB ... okay apparently Dim was putting package files there for a while ... so went to copy them to the K drive with all the rest and apparently I did that already ... so I will now gain 36 gigs on the C drive. 
---
without those files... the Daz 3d folder in documents was down to 1G so just backed the entire folder

NorthOf45

I use the command-line ROBOCOPY. It has a ton of configurable options.