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
With Dropbox, I... don't do anything. It's just always backed up, so long as I'm connected. Or I can shut it off and turn it on at the end of the day or whatever.
Cloud storage is way better for access anywhere. Like WT I have Dropbox. Dropbox is great. And the odds of my cloud storage going kaput at the same time as a hard drive is basically nil.
Guys, you're paying $10 per month for 1 TB with Dropbox? After a few months that pays for a 1TB HD. I assume most of us need at least 1 TB.
And if I'm going somewhere and need files I just copy to my laptop that I take with me. Or just email them to myself.
Anyway, whatever works. Personally I just don't get it.
I agree about the bandwidth if you have a slow connection, at least the first time when you have to upload all your stuff. But after that it's only new and changed files that you need to upload. And connections get faster and faster - we can get 1000/100 Mbit connections here now for about $110/month or a 50/10 for about $32/month.
As for the price, you pay $10/month per computer for unlimited backup (I know of some who have several TB backed up) on a Crashplan Small Business plan. That's less than I've spent on content per day on average, for the last 9 years.
Not me. I don't back up things like my main Windows install or anything I can easily reinstall. I only backup things I need to backup like photos, images, written documents, other things I've created, and files with limited downloads or that have/will become inaccessible like outdated software.
You can buy a portable USB drive that's 500GB for less than $50. And you can take it with you anywhere in your pocket.
This is one more thing to carry and I have to copy back and forth my files. I do not have to do this with Dropbox. Bonus: I can share Dropbox folders with anyone across the world whenever I want.
They definitely aren't. Some brands/types - even some of the better brands - may be unreadable after just a few years, others may be fine after 10+ years, and you can't know for sure which ones are good or bad before after a few years. I used to make 3 different copies of each backup on three different brands for the same reason, then there was a good chance that at least one per set would be readable after some years.
There is a type called M-Disc which are supposed to be stable for 1000 years but obviously they haven't been real-time tested so no one knows how long they actually will be readable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Not much trouble IMO, have done it hundreds of times on multiple PCs during the last 15 years. Never had a problem or a corrupted image file. I can CRC verify image integrity very quickly because it's just one file.
I do that for data drives, all data drives have an internal mirrored (not RAID) backup drive. Plus at least one external backup, and a cloud backup.
For system drives (I never store data on these) I always create an image, and never when the system is running, to avoid any complications with locked files etc.. This way I can restore the system within a couple of hours to a new disk, or on the same disk if the system is messed up, with the original boot sector or chose any special settings I'd want.
If the cloud service goes down, I just find another. Until then I have the backup if all else should fail. And they keep all versions of all files you have ever uploaded, even if you delete them locally. And my files can't be hacked in the cloud, they are automatically encrypted using a long password I have chosen before they are uploaded, so not even CrashPlan can access them.
I doubt CrashPlan will go down though, they're very big and have existed for many years and are used by many big companies.
I already have at least two backup copies of all important data, on separate disks. I wouldn't trust a cloud service as the only backup of course, just as an extra precaution in case the house burns down or my disks are stolen or whatever.
I feel your pain. This has happened to me twice in my time in 3D. One was just last year.
Oh, the other thing I like about Dropbox (and I assume other similar things) is version control. If I save over something badly, it has a really simple UI for recovering earlier versions of my files.
And yeah, I'm sure you COULD do that with local backups, but it's a lot more involved and I hate doing anything involved with computers.
This too! This has saved my rear end more than once.
So, I most of my content on an external hard drive (one for the pc and one for the laptop). They have everything on it that isn't absolutely required to be on the C drive as I don't have enough room on the C drive for the amount of stuff I have (especially Daz lol). They both have basically the same things, with a few differences in content as far as art images and photos go. One is 4TB and one is 3. Sounds like what I really should do is get two more external drives and set them up to save changes daily as I actually use the two external drives every day. I just lost one of the external drives, it was new, lasted all of two months and it died. So, I lost everything on that drive that was connected to the laptop.
The problem with Cloud Storage to me was that it was still impractical for large projects and very large files. I have been a video editor for years and video files are massive. The edited projects even larger still. So, being able to work locally has always been a necessity. I use Dropbox for all my small stuff. Luckily I didn't lose all my screenplays. Those I work off of Dropbox with so I have access on my computer, iPad and even my phone. But that scenario doesn't apply with DAZ and 3D at all.
Today I started downloading all my Rendo stuff. I also reached out to AeonSoul and am begging for a way to get some of this back. I have all of my email receipts from the last 5 years of RDNA content, so maybe by some miracle they will be able to help me get back some of that stuff. Like this stuff:
https://geminii23.deviantart.com/art/Final-Fantasy-Z-422174984
That was one of my favorite pieces. Sucks that I can never do anything with it again (such as getting larger Giclee prints made) and I lost all three of those AS products.
Soemthing tells me that if a hurricane, tornado, sharknado, flying house eating pirahna attack or other unforeseeable un/natural disaster came through and wiped out my house, my town and everything I own...losing my DAZ stuff might be the least of my problems at that point. LOL
Since my internet access from home is 50 KB/second dial-up, with a 210 minute connect limit I couldn't use a cloud service even if I wanted to - which I don't. The only way this will change is if I sell out and buy a house elsewhere or win a big enough lottery to have a dedicated fiber T3 installed. I run my backups on alternating drives and then swap them with the ones at my mother's house (25 miles NW of my place). I'm seriously considering another two pair of drives so I can keep the current backup here and mirror it to go off-site the same day. The only real hazard is fire; we've both been hit by burglars and the clowns around here won't touch computers as they're not worth enough. If they can't be converted to cash and a 'fix' on the same day they have no value.
Heh, very true, at least in the short term. But I was looking more long term once you got everything sorted back out and were trying to return to life as normal. Also, mainly I was pointing out a real world example of why cloud storage is actually a good idea, at least for the most irreplaceable data
I have my USB backup drives in a fireproof safe. The cord may melt, but that's about it.
I do both cloud and local backups. Backup is actually more of a secondary use of my cloud storage, though. The main use is sharing between systems. I have Office 365 Personal so I have 1 TB of OneDrive space. I set my user folders to sync automatically, so the file goes to the cloud. I also have my phone's camera roll set to sync to OneDrive so all the pictures I take with it are waiting for me on my desktop when I get home.
For folders I want to share, such as my Daz content library, I set them to sync with my laptop so anything I install on either machine is available without me having to think about it. It's great for working on scenes - I can save it at home, then pick it up again at lunch on my laptop when I am at work, then finish things back at home without needing to save to a USB between the two.
I also have a dedicated 1 TB USB drive for my desktop and one for my laptop that I use to backup locally. That provides quicker restore for large amounts of data and is a fail-safe in the event something happens to the cloud files.
I don't think a fireproof safe will help much. While there won't be any visible damage, the heat from a fire will still mess up the electronics and even a really good fireproof safe can only protect the contents from heat for about a half hour.
We did a USB swap with my parents of important family documents (PDF's of birth certificates, etc.).
So which application are you talking about?
So sorry to hear that :(
I've also been there (losing art and a daily journal I kept for 4 or 5 years on my hard drive). It's a gutting feeling. Nowadays I do a monthly ritual of copying stuff to an external hard drive as well as uploading to a cloud service.
Hopefully you're able to recover something.,..
Yeah, I've been waiting to hear the name of this application too.
Sorry, I haven't actually gotten into it for a long time, it just does its thing in the background. I just checked and it's called SyncFolders, but I recall there were a few others out there that were free and did similar stuff. Can't recall why I chose this one.
Pretty easy to use, it's a bit like in some mail apps where you set up rules to tell it where to send new email. You just set up a new rule, tell it which folder to sync with the other drive (you also need to define the "action", which specifies whether it's a one-way or both-way synchronizing), and then tell it the schedule for doing it, and I think that's about it. Just keep adding rules for each folder you want to synch.
Ok, so things are looking promising. Was able to download all my Rendo purchases. AeonSoul helped me get back their products as well! WhooHoo! So happy about that! There are still a few missing things from RTDNA, but not sure if I will be able to locate those PAs though. I wish I could remember how I had my file structure for all my third party content. I had spent so much time organizing it and now everything seems so foreign to me.
I know the feeling. I had 3 years worth of work (renders, postwork, pages, vids) mostly go kaput except for those I uploaded in cloud storage (though barely a fraction) for whatever insight I had at the time. It's depressing because there's heart and soul put in there that you can't get back. The depression can be extreme. But all you can do is move forward... and backup more often. Have to admit the experience made me paranoid to have multiple backups. Can never be too cautious.
There is no perfect answer for all imaginable problems. My house may burn down, the Norks might set off an EMP device, DHS might show up with a warrant.
We do what we can to mitigate reasonable risks, rather than think about everything that can possibly go wrong and do nothing at all. And yes, a hard drive can withstand a house fire in a consumer-level firesafe. Not saying it always will, but it beats trusting luck and doing nothing.