Digital Art Zone

Hi!  I really hope someone can help me with this - all along since I started using Daz 4, I set up a complex and yet easy for me to find things set of folders under the Categories tab - and took countless hours going through the confusing jungles of folders in the Poser and Daz categories finding all the clothing, their materials files, the morphs, the textures, the different props and sets and well everything, and then everything related to it, and sorted it all out and put it together in a way that I knew exactly where everything was.  This worked great for me until today, when I started Daz 4, and tried to use the Categories folder - which now appears to be empty! 

PLEASE tell me that there is some way to get this back.  It kind of makes me sick to think that all that work has been somehow erased.  I guess if that is the case, I am not going to do it that way, I’ll just delete everything and reload it all separately if possible and try to sort it into different runtimes or something.  That will cost me a tremendous amount of time, but the way it is now, it’s impossible to find anything.  Soo hoping there is some sort of answer to the mysterious dissapearance of all my categories folders…

Thanks for any help!  -Cathy

Hi Cathy

The best thing to do would be to raise a support ticket right away, so you can get professional technical help on this. I also suggest not moving/renaming/deleting anything until you’ve figured out what the problem is, as that could potentially lead to permanent loss. Generally, if you had data on your drive, its probably still there, but the programs cannot find it. As a precaution, I suggest immediately making a backup of your content database (all the files in C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\Content Management Service\databases).

When something unexplained like this happens from one day to the next, something changed on your computer from yesterday to today. Your first reaction is probably “I didn’t change anything” but think through anything that you changed or may have changed since the last time it worked. Consider installing or upgrading software, moving files and folder, adding or removing devices, changing users or permissions etc.

Then you want to start narrowing down the cause of the problem. Is your content still there in the My Library folder? Can you load items into DAZ Studio from the native folders view? Can you see anything in Smart Content? Are the items categorized in the “Default” category tree? Is the CMS service running? Can you open a saved scene file? How big are the files in C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\Content Management Service\databases? etc.

If Categories is completely empty (not even the Default categories) then either the CMS isn’t running or something is blocking it from communicating.  Shut down DS4, then go to Start > All Programs > DAZ 3D > DAZ Content Management Service and click on “Start DAZ Content Management Service”.

Hi cridgit and fixmypcmike - thanks so much to both of you! Although actually cridgit’s post is what got me thinking about what could be the cause - I began reviewing what I could have done that could have had any effect on the “categories” (and also the “products”) since neither of these have the real physical files in them and are actually cross-references from what I can understand that Daz set up to organize with if you choose - I use categories because I have a large amount of files under Daz 3 runtime that is not seen by “smart content”.

Anyway, I thought about it and the other night due to lightning storms I had turned off my computer - I usually leave it on.  When I tried to restart it in the morning, it wouldn’t cycle up, and so was sitting there unresponsive.  After waiting over 20 minutes and listening to it struggling to power up, I turned it off.  I know that is a bad thing to do, but I figured I was loosing the hard-drive and letting it grind like that might be just as bad as turning it off. 

I waited about 10 minutes and restarted while praying fervently - this time it managed to start up completely, but after giving me the message that windows hadn’t been shut down correctly.  It didn’t occur to me that content manager hadn’t been started until I saw your post cridgit and thought about it - turned it on this morning, started up Daz, and ooooh thank you there are my multitudes of categories… I was so depressed thinking I would have to rework the weeks it took setting that all up.  So although I had it fixed before reading your post fixmypcmike, you also nailed it as to what was the problem - again thank you both very much!!! I am soooooooo glad I asked here before undertaking the task I had imagined - Uninstalling and reinstalling EVERYTHING. Now I know to check whether that’s running or not before panicking!   

-Cathy

Glad you got it worked out, Cathy.