Problems with installing Smart Content from Daz Connect onto External Hard Drive
Epic82
Posts: 126
On February 7, I started a discussion here in which I asked whether I could use an external or internal hard drive to store the large amount of Daz Connect content I own. I decided to purchase a WD 4TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive. I installed this external hard drive and followed instructions on videos like this one to create a storage pool to combine my 1 TB internal drive with the 4 TB external drive, thinking that would be the way to combine both drives. But even though I’ve created a storage pool, as you can see in the second attachment below, when I install more content through Daz Connect, the content continues to fill only the internal hard drive. And when I fill the internal hard drive completely, different programs start to crash, like Daz Studio, Google Chrome, and even my desktop wallpaper disappears. I’ve uninstalled some of my content so I can write this post without the internet crashing, but the first attachment below shows how much storage space I have left on my internal and external drives.
I, honestly, don’t know what I’m doing. How can I get my computer to install Smart Content onto my external drive?
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Comments
Can a storage pool split folders across the component drives? My vague recollection is not. For Connect moving teh whole thing to another drive and pointing DS to the nwe location (the folder that held /Data/cloud) would be seamless as the database stoes only relative paths within the content directory and doesn't care where the content directory is.
Mr. Haseltine,
Thank you for your reply. Are saying that I should uninstall all my Daz Connect content and reinstall it onto the new hard drive? If that's what you're saying, how do I point DS to the new hard drive?
No, you can just copy the whole folder across (the contents of one specified as the current Connect directory - Daz 3d/Studio/My Daz Connect Library as i recall, in the Docuemnts folder - to the desird folder on the new drive, make sure that that folder is now set as the Connect data diectory in Edit>Preferences>Content tab>Content Directory Manager, and all your connect isntalled content should be available and usable.
I've had zero luck in doing this on macOS. I started out by completely uninstalling. Then, in DIM, set up to use my external RAID. That worked well. In Daz Studio though, things went horribly wrong. I had to manually install everything I needed access to as I found no method to simply point the software to the files DIM downloaded. Maybe I missed something.
Anyhow, I ended up with several GB of stuff in my Documents folder. Attempting to move those rendered everything useless, so uninstalled completely again. Maybe one day will try again, but for now, living without Daz.
FIXED on macOS. I just did a complete install from scratch. The issue I had before was a simple fix (outlined in steps #4 and #5) below:
1. After installing DIM, first go into its settings. Set the 'Package Archive', 'Thumbnail Archive' (both under the 'Downloads' tab) as well as the 'Manifest Archive' and 'My DAZ 3D Library' (both under the 'Installation' tab) to all be on an external drive.
2. Use DIM to download and install all assets.
3. Launch DAZ Studio, and in its preferences under 'General', set up the Temp file and DSON Cache locations (I set these to be my scratch RAID).
4. Still in preferences, but in the 'Content' tab, go into 'Content Directory Manager...' and fix up any necessary paths. In my case, it already had the path for 'Daz Connect Data' set correctly. As well as the '.../Studio/MyLibrary' entry under 'DAZ Studio Formats'. But the 'My DAZ 3D Library' under this latter section still pointed to a shared user folder on the boot drive. So I updated that to point correctly to 'My DAZ 3D Library' as specified in DIM. Seems to be a bug here in that DAZ Studio should have used the path as set up in DIM.
5. Finally, back in the main application, I had to manually set the path for the 'My DAZ 3D Library' item under 'Content Library'. It too was pointing to a default shared user location. Again, would have been nice to have it pick up the path as set up in DIM.
The only files now on my boot drive are the applications themselves, preference files and application support files containing the cms system. There appears to be a way to move the cms system, but it's not very large so leaving it on the boot drive. The main goal here was to offload large data to an external drive. This should now make moving to new systems so much easier.