Recovering metadata
Trake118
Posts: 79
I recently formated my hard drive to do a clean install of Windows 10. I thought I was safe to do this because I don't have my content management directory on the hard drive being formatted. As usual, I have made a grave error and it didn't go through the proper steps before the format to backup my user-generated metadata. Do I now have to completely start over yet again? Where on the hard drive does the user-generated metadata get stored if you don't do a backup?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
The "UserData_1.dsx" is normally stored in the ".\Runtime\Support" directory of your content library folder. But AFAIK you'll have to export your UserData every time you change something manually ("Content Library" options menu, "Content DB Maintenance...", "Export User Data"), It doesn't do that by itself automatically. If you have formatted your content library as well, I fear your user-generated metadata is gone lost. If not you can try and re-import the metadata ("Content Library" options menu, "Content DB Maintenance...", "Re-Import Metadata..." and tag the "User Data" "UserData 1" field). Given that you have exported it at first anytime before, naturally.
I have a backup but it's VERY old and I don't want to go through all of this crap again. I have a backup of my "Content Mangament service" as I thought that was where the data was, but I guess that's worthless and I'm up the creek without a paddal. I think the data at one point in time worked that way, but I guess now that they've moved to the cms system you have to get the data some other way. I wish they would stop chaning the way this kind of stuff get's backed up and just keep a constantly up to date metadata file in the content folder.
I just upgraded to Windows 7 so I can upgrade to Windows 10. Might you still have your Windows.old folder on your hard drive? If so, your files might be in there.
No dice, but I don't know what I'd be looking for anyways. It's almost impossible to move a daz installation. I have started over but I did a lot of categorizing on my Laptap. I have the categories there, but they can't be moved because the DB backup process times out so I can't export the mapped directories. I know they have to be on the hard drive somewhere. After all, they are there after I restart the computer, so they must be on the hard drive. Anyone know anything I can do to move my metadata out of my laptop given that the metadata export process times out?
I forgot to mention, I have a ContentDB.dat and ContentDB.ind file. I don't know if that can be used in any real way, but I do have those files.
Are you saying the Export User Data times out? What messages are you seeing? I know it took a long time using Valentina, but I don't know of any time limit on it.
It actaully doesn't display a message, it just doesn't output the data. Because of that you can easily thing you've exported the data when you really haven't and next thing you know you're back to square one on your categorizing. It's very tricky like that. In fact, it took a while for me to find out it wasn't actually exporting user data at all. You don't see that it's timing out untill you look at the log file. It looks like I'm once again going to have to redo LOTS of metadata work. I spend far more time working with metadata on Daz Studio than anything else. I just can never keep my database. I had a solution under the Valentina system where it would just automatically store my metadata as I created it in the same base directory as my content. That way I always had the data and stoped worying about it. That's a part of why I got caught off my guard with the postgreSQL stuff. I was used having my metadata just move along with my content. PostgreSQL has some serious issues, especially since it doesn't give you an error message when it fails. I can't work with this new system unless I can find a way to actually get it to store the data in relative paths in the same root directory as my content. That's the only reliable way to fix this problem.
If you were curious, here is the error message from my log file:
WARNING: dzpostgresqlobjectdatabase.
cpp(39): DB Select error: ERROR: canceling statement due to statement timeout
DB Select error: ERROR: canceling statement due to statement timeout
You could change the cluster location to be where you want it to be. You can also uninstall PostgreSQL CMS and it will revert to Valentina. I'm just surprised, as I hadn't heard of anyone having more trouble with PostgreSQL than Valentina unless they were using ZoneAlarm.