HDD crash - older content gone.

marble

So I had split my DAZ Content Libraries over two disk drives. The older, legacy/Poser format stuff was on my 2TB HDD (mechanical) and the newer, G2 onwards, content is in a different library on a fast NVME-SDD drive. Then, a couple of days ago my old HDD gave up on me and I have had to replace it with another NVME drive. Unfortunately I thought I had a backup of all my DAZ content but it seems I had neglected to backup the older library on the HDD so that is all gone.

I guess I could download it all again from DAZ but I'm tending to think that I would probably not use most of it anyway. I sometimes use older props and convert them to IRay and save them as .duf files but that's a pretty rare event these days. What surprised me though is that when I looked in my Install Manager, all the old content is still listed. I had thought that the IM is a list of installed content local to my computer but it now seems that it gets the list from an online database at DAZ. Is that correct? I think I still have all the DIM downloads as they were backed up but not restored yet. I'm just curious how the online/local relationship works.

barbult

This is my understanding:

DIM updates the list of products you own from a Daz database every time you log in to DIM. That "list" is saved on your computer as dsx files in your DIM downloads folder (the Package Archive).  DIM gets the list of products you have previously downloaded and installed from dsx files saved on your computer in the Manifest Archive folder. If you don't log in to DIM, but instead work offline, DIM uses the archive files on your computer  to determine what products you own and what you have previously downloaded and installed. If you lose the Manifest Archive because of a hard drive problem, or because you delete the files, or because you move them manually and don't update DIM settings, DIM will no longer know what you have installed.