Running out of room

CoyoteSeven

I have an older machine with only a 500GB drive and I'm running out of room.  I should also mention I'm still using 4.8 not 4.9... I don't trust "the cloud" or want anybody snooping in my HD.  Plus after reading about all the problems some are having with Poser, nonDRM and older materials with 4.9, I really don't need those headaches.

I've been going through my database and deleting old content I'm not using anymore (still have original install backups on a 3TB USB external just in case I find the need for something later) and it's proving a daunting task to find all the children files of the stuff, but I'm muddling through.  The delete option option when you right click on an item to delete, does not get rid of everything.

Example... I want to get rid of a G2F/V6 character, deleting the character in either the smart content or content tab only gets rid of the morph and not any associated files like textures... that's when I have to manually use Windows file manager and track these down to get rid of.

Question #1:  Is there a way to get rid of everything associated with a file in one single stroke (character, morph, textures, etc.)?

I've also scanned throughout the forums to find a definitive answer to the condense database option in the database maintainance funtion, but have really yet to find one so...

Question#2:  Will the condense database actually "squeeze" my bloated database and give me some much needed extra room on my HD without too many side-effects?

 

Thank you!

Leana

CoyoteSeven said:

Question #1:  Is there a way to get rid of everything associated with a file in one single stroke (character, morph, textures, etc.)?

Yes, install and uninstall products with DIM or Connect. For a manual install then I'm affraid it's not possible.

CoyoteSeven

I' give that a try for the DIM listed things, hopefully will save me some time.

I quit using DIM for installs long ago, because it never really worked right, it usually left something out of the install (Meta info, textures, .obj, etc.), even after numerous DIM updates.  I now manually install and then use the DB maintainance to re-import Meta info on the new things.

mjc1016

#2...No,  content does not equal database.  It is doubtful that the database that tracks your content (all those metadata files) is really all that large.

On a side note...the 'cloud' talked about in 4.9 is delivery...and really it isn't much different than the way content is currently delivered or how you connect to the site/store.  Connect just internalizes it to Studio instead of having to use an external downloader (DIM) or a browser.

sriesch

Leana said:

CoyoteSeven said:

Question #1:  Is there a way to get rid of everything associated with a file in one single stroke (character, morph, textures, etc.)?

Yes, install and uninstall products with DIM or Connect. For a manual install then I'm affraid it's not possible.

This won't help you today, but one option to consider in the future is having multiple runtimes.  Personally I manually install one product per runtime in a folder named after the product, so if I want to delete all the associated files, I really can just delete them all with a single keystroke.  There are also downsides and potential problems with this method of installation though.

Some content comes with files intended for multiple applications (DAZ Studio, Poser, Bryce, .obj formats for unknown other applications, etc.).  If you do not use those applications, possibly you could track down and remove those unneeded files.  However, I would do a LOT of research beforehand and obviously have backups available in case it turns out you or somebody else misunderstood something.  For example some of the content that is supposedly for poser may be used or needed by DAZ Studio or is used by me in DAZ Studio.  And of course you could later change your mind and want them and it might be a lot harder to put them all back than to delete them.

sriesch

You may also want to consider saving disk space by cleaning things other than your content library. 

Just for kicks I glanced at mine since I also have a 500GB drive.  I have a little over 3300 products installed (yikes!  when did that happen?) and while that does eat up a lot of disk space on backups when keeping multiple backups including the original installers, the actual installed content itself is only using 180GB of disk space.  Of course your milage may vary, different kinds of products use more or less disk space and even if your content isn't the bulk of your used space you may still need all other files, but it's worth taking a few minutes to look into just in case.