Sharing content on a cloud drive between Windows and Mac?
i_hate_mayonnaise
Posts: 92
in The Commons
I have Daz 4.8 on my Windows 8.1 PC and a 2015 Macbook Pro that I just recently purchased. If I purchase a home network cloud drive such as a MyCloud, can I transfer all of my Daz content to this drive and then share it between my Windows and Mac computers?
Thanks in advance!
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Greetings,
I do this with Dropbox, in fact, sharing about a TB of content between the two. Works pretty well, although I'm careful to only do content installs on one system, as you can get conflicts if you do installs from both.
It may not work as well for encrypted content, I'm not sure... I don't have enough yet to have run into anything.
The machine you install on will update it's smart content database, but you'll have to do occasional imports on the other side. (Or, with recent versions, it might automatically recognize that it has to update metadata and do it in the background on startup.)
I don't usually care, because I do all my scene setup on my Mac, save my scene (in a shared directory), and in around a minute when it's all synched to the other box, I load the scene on the Windows box that has a GPU, and hit render.
It's not QUITE the same as your setup, but it has the same behaviors I think.
-- Morgan
That makes sense to only perform content installs on one machine. That is exactly what I want do to with my Mac, just setup the scene and render using my Windows machine.
Thanks a ton for the insight!
So the Windows format content installs for DAZ work with osX variant of DAZ?
I am thinking of making a Bootcamp install of Windows 10 on the next release of a Mac Mini and I would basically create a shared local partition that was used by os X & Windows 10 depending on which was booted for DAZ 3D, Poser, and all these content space using apps.
Ordinary content files and directory structure are exactly the same between operating systems. Plugins, on the other hand, tend to have separate versions for each.
I loaded all my content onto the cloud drive and I've mounted the drive on my Mac, but it doesn't seem to find the content. Though I did designate the "Volumes" directory under Content Management settings. When I choose "Search Hard Drive(s) for Files" all I see is "/" and cannot designate where to look. I mapped this to an S: drive in Windows and can choose those just fine. I'm not an expert with Mac so if anyone has any pointers on how to point Daz in the right direction would be much appreciated!
recommend doing it this way: use an external SSD. They're the ideal place for content, and exFAT is read by both OSX and Windows. They're great for other reasons too-- very, very fast.
I have an external HDD but I want to be able to share between all of my devices on my home network without having to move an HDD/SSD from one machine to the other.
Bear in mind that slow access to large content libraries is a MAJOR drag on performance. What works for you will depend on just how big your content is-- you will grow old waiting for Daz to do its "reimport Metadata" thing over a wireless connection. If you have a very fast LAN, and Network Attached Storage, you could use that as a common Library . . . but I wouldn't do it.
Samsung external SSD's are cheap and getting cheaper: 250 gb for $80, really can't be beat.
You will get better performance out of your machines, and much fewer flaky Daz problems, if you give each machine its own dedicated content library.
I do have gigabit capable LAN. The content library on my personal server performs fine on my Surface. What I am asking is how to properly point Daz to 3rd party content from a server on a Mac. I don't want to use external HDDs or SSDs.
How would one even locate 3rd party content using an external HDD or SSD on a Mac? When I tell Daz to scan hard drives for files all I see is "/" whereas on Windows I can point to C:/, D:/, etc.
I have added the directories in CMS management but nothing happens when I scan known directories.
For a Windows machine to navigate a Mac (or Linux) server, with it appearing to be a native WinOS volume, the most common solution would be SMB.
You can try it, but given the twitchiness of the Daz CMS, I would recommend against it.
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18707?locale=en_US for enabling SMB
Once you "see" the drive on your Windows system, you'd do the reimport Metadata thing.
The "scan known directories" function for does not work -- for me, on OSX-- for external drives. Don't know why, but that's how it is on my machine. You _might_ try creating a local alias so that the external drive "looks like" a Windows directory.
But again, my two cents' worth: for economy and robustness of solution, this aint' the way to go.
It certainly seems this is not the way to go. Who would have thought it would be such a task on Mac.
Sadly, I've already tried SMB and AFP as well, and also created an alias. I haven't tried something like Parallels or Boot Camp, but that would somewhat be pointless anyway.
I guess I will just stick to working on my desktop.
Buy an external SSD, copy the My Daz Library, and then you have it on your Mac. That's what I did . . . works reliably, the SSD is blazing fast. Its wonderfully convenient that the exFAT format for SSDs is natively read by both Windows and OSX.
And you'll have an SSD-- much, much faster access to files than rotating media.
I will give that a try. Thanks for all your help.
OK, trying to sort it out...
There are several things here that can go bad, be mixed up or fail. First, network drives are generally slow, much slower than accessing the disk. if you have a 1000Base-T network, and has a swictn capable of full duplex between all ports, you will probably reach about 380MBit/second in transfer, that is around 35MB/s. I won't go into details but that is about what you get over any ethernet CSMA/CD network. Your SATA drive reads at 300Mbyte/s, at least.
But that isn't the hard part, the hard part is that when you mount a drive ovcer the network, it will show up in /Volumes as a mount point, for example "MyDrive". If (or rather when) the connection is interrupted to the drive, it will show up as "MyDrive-1". etc. That will cause a rather gruesome problem when you have configured DAZ Studio to look at "/Volumes/myDrive". Another thing is the smart content (CMS),. which won't be updated when yiu install with DIM onto one partition, you need to force it to update by reimporting meta data everything you install something from "other machine".
I would recommend that you have a "MyLibrary" locally on each machine, but let DIM store the downloads on the network drive. Then you ony have to download once, and can then install to all systems in your household (which is what the DAZ EULA allows you to do too).
I have an iMac which is my main computer. I recently purchased a windows computer with a nice graphics card which is dedicated solely to DAZ studio. My poser runtime is stored on an external drive attached to my iMac and shared via the "Sharing" tab under my mac's preferences (I think there is a check box to indicate that the share will also be used by windows computers). I then have that share mounted as z: and I have added that "disk" to windows' DS runtime list. When I mounted the disk, I told it to mount each time I restart. I just need to make sure that my mac is properly booted before the windows computer boots up. I have created a .bat file to run when I boot them out of order, but I never use it.
I generally create my files on my mac, save them to a shared directory and then load them onto the windows computer via VNC (similar to remote desktop, but my computer came with windows home, and won't do remote desktop...grrrr). Assuming that there aren't any weird files that aren't a part of that common runtime, the windows computer loads everything just fine and renders without complaint. The windows computer has no monitor, so it has to be used via VNC. But, you might not have to go that far.
I tried copying my mac's runtime directly onto my window's C: drive, which is plenty big enough, and the render time weren only a few seconds different. So, considering the complexity of rendering scenes like most people do, I think those seconds aren't worth the hours it took for robocopy to plow through the huge runtime to find things to update. If you have a very stable runtime that you seldom update via new purchases, then it's probably worth looking into. But, seriously...we are talking less than 1 minute difference to pull even large textures over via the network. For a render that takes even 20 minutes on the remote, GPU enabled machine that might take 4 hours on my mac...I don't care about those few seconds.
One thing my set up will NOT allow are installs from DAZ Connect. If you install content into the shared directory via DAZ connect, the remote computer can't use it. So, my solution is to ignore DAZ Connect entirely. If it isn't available as a DIM product, I just ignore that it even exists. It could be that using DAZ connect on both computers will work, but I never bothered to try. I have severl freebies that I'll maybe use a year from now, or I'll have forgotten about them...
I bought an external drive yesterday and let it copy my data overnight. I will post my results later today. Hopefully Daz on my MacBook Pro finds the drive with no issues.
Greetings,
You should be able to go into DAZ Studio, add a DAZ format directory to the Content Directory Manager and point it to the shared My Library. I had not realized that you were going to try and use a single mounted network volume for both. You CAN do that, but it's going to be Slow...As...Heck.
The Dropbox (or similar tools) solution puts a copy locally on each desktop that's connected to the cloud service. E.g. my NAS (a Synology DS413j) has a Dropbox-like service that'll sync a directory between all clients and the server. This is the optimal answer, since it makes everything local, and just takes a few moments to sync when saving.
Do not use the 'scan hard drives' version, that has never worked for me. Just manually add the directories, and it should be okay.
I did some other stuff... Ah, there it is. Okay, on my Mac, DAZ Studio created a '/Users/Shared/DAZ 3D' directory. I symlinked that to /Users/`whoami`/Dropbox/DAZ/InstallManager and I *believe* I did something vaguely similar on the Windows box, so they shared their ManifestFiles directory, but the downloads directory was linked back to a local directory so Dropbox wouldn't try to sync downloaded files. That might not be necessary.
Anyway, the core of it is that you should be able to manually add the DAZ format directories to DAZ Studio, and then browse them in the Content Directory. Don't use the scan approach, if it doesn't work it leaves you out of the loop.
-- Morgan
If I want to do this on Mac, do I have to add each individual items basic root path in the content manager directory? I can't just say "/volume/daz/my library/runtime" and then it searches for whatever I am needing in each of the proceeding folders? I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around how to actually get 3rd party content visible to Daz that is not on my physical SSD in the laptop itself.
I only have a 128gb MacBook Pro and about 250gb of Daz content so the onboard drive itself is not an option. I added the root file path in the CMS manager and it just doesn't find anything. On Windows I've always had to scan hard drives and scan known directories to have 3rd party content to be "searchable".
EDIT: I created a Symlink on my Mac desktop that links to my external hard drive, added the path to the CMS Manager and still get nothing when I search for my 3rd party content that I search for. What am I doing wrong?
Couple of tips here.
1) When you start up DS, it will offer you an option to connect to you online Daz account, or to work offline -- pick "work offline". There's considerable complexity in the interplay between content you've got in the cloud, and content you've got locally. Picking "work offline" makes it easier.
2) The place you want to add your content is in the Content Directory Manager.
3) then run "Import Metadata".
NB: the function "Search Hard Drives for Files" and "Scan Known Directories for files" under Content Directory Manager does not work for me with external drives, under OSX. Maybe a quirk in my system, but doing steps 1,2,3, I'm able to access my entire library on an external drive. Note: this process is slow. With 250 gb of Daz content, particularly if its on a slow drive, you should be patient, let it run overnight.
I must not have hardly any metadata as the list was only about 1% of my products.
So: you have to enter the directories in the Content Directory Manager. The Daz material has metadata -- and the directories where you find it should be entered under "Daz Studio Formats". Your Poser format directories you will enter under "Poser formats". The Poser material doesn't have metadata, so it won't show up in SmartContent (unless you add it manually). Instead, you'll find it under Content Library. Attached is a screengrab of a Poser asset as seen in my Content Library.
These directories all have to be added manually in Content Directory Manager. NB: you don't want too many of these directories in any one "Content Set"; DS lets you create more than one Content Set, I've just got everything in one. If you've got hundreds of runtimes in individual folders, you'll need to merge them into a smaller number, handles much more easily. I used DittoGui for this . . .
Greetings,
Just to note, /volume/daz/my library/runtime is NOT the directory you want to add. You want to add /volume/daz/my library. That's the root for DAZ Studio's purposes, at least when you're adding a DAZ format directory to the Content Directory Manager.
-- Morgan