Too Much Stuff!!
nightwolf1982
Posts: 1,226
in The Commons
Well, it finally happened. I finally reached a point where I've downloaded so much content that I was forced to buy a new external hard drive, as both my main drive and my old external drive were nearly full. Anyone else reached this milestone?

Comments
Yes, just bought a 3 T hard drive to contain it all. Wish I had done it sooner.
Welcome to the club ;)
Laurie
...yep upgraded from a 1 - 2 GB content library drive after the meltdown last fall, and it's already almost half full. I haven't even loaded most of my freebie library yet. Doing so as the need arises.
Two 6Tb drives in RAID 0... and it's more than 75% full... And that does not include old stuff I've deleted.
Please tell me that's all backed up somewhere else as well? :)
I'll be there soon, but... how do you make it work, you've got a split library? How does Daz know here to look when the stuff is on more than one place? Or is it only the download files you have on the extra. I have two HDs atm one for Daz and the other one for everything else.
That IS the back up, an NAS which stays off line until I do my monthly saves from my F-drive (content drive).
About a year ago, a power surge burned out my computer's power supply and hard drive, so I lost almost everything, and it took me three months to repair and restore my PC. That's when I got the NAS and an uninterruptable power supply. Now, even if every power circuit in my house and PC burn out, I still have the NAS to restore the content. Unless, of course the whole house burns down... Maybe I should get a fireproof safe, or an off-site bank vault no one is using...
Good.. though if it's definately RAID-0 bear in mind that it's striped, so one bad drive and you'll lose the whole thing. Not such a problem given it's a 'copy' but it's something to be weary of.
I lost all my pre-genesis libraries when my external died. It was mechanical, the surface was okay until the last moment. I hold it in my hand and it feels like a bird floating around inside. Really strange. And oddly sad.
I'd say that 90% of the stuff I actually would use today is reclaimable by either saved zips, daz DIM, or redownloading from 'another place'.
It just means I completely started over from scratch. I planned to do that with My Library anyway. But it's taking F.O.R.E.V.E.R
Funny you should bring it up. I'm in the process of moving all my libraries from the 2TB drive that came with The Beast to a 4TB drive I was using for all my assorted graphics and content files, including my DIM downloads. The files that were on the 4TB drive were migrated to a brand new 8TB drive while I slept Monday morning… Rendered images take up a lot of disk space!
I just moved from a 1TB SSD to roping it with another 1TB SSD in Raid 0. I need to slow down my purchasing before it keeps growing. (And yes, I bought an 8GB External for the sole purpose of File History as well as buying some cloud backup as well).
Raid 0 = single point of failure. Data smeared across two disks (twice the probability of losing data)
Raid 1 = redundancy. Data mirrored separately on two disks. (half the probability of losing data)
http://blog.logicalincrements.com/2016/10/version-raid-best-raid-0-vs-raid-1/
I too would be a bit wary of Raid 0 and have a separate backup
Daz can handle multiple directories. I set one up for my large items on my secondary drive and add it as a daz directory. It saves me a lot of space to move billboards and hdri there.
ijust change the installed items path in dim when I want to use that
Thanks, Richard and LeatherGryphon. Good to know, even if it means a lot of work to correct my mistake.
This is what I've had to do too. I keep stuff for making the person and clothes on the laptop, but sets, hdri, etc go on the external hard drive. Basically anything over 400megs that isn't a person.
Yes. I'm there and beyond. My largest external drive is 8TB. It's 3.57 full and has 3.70 free. Doesn't take long to fill them up does it? Plus I have 4 other smaller drives that are so full I can't save anything to them.
I'm thinking about buying another large drive and either consolidate all the content from my full drives onto it, or moving my main content library onto it. My main content library is 2TB+.
Not sure 8TB would cut it anymore, but I've heard the larger the drive, the longer it takes to access files. Seems hopeless.
Five years from now we are all going to wondering how we managed before the petabyte drives came out...
Okay, I have a question...this could probably be another thread in and of itself...how are y'all not going mad from all the options on what to use?
I have a 4TB drive and I have backups to the backup. I have a database to keep all of the stuff I've got but when I try to do a simple image, I swear I can get overwhelmed with all the options to the point where I either start late with a project or after starting it, develope it slowly...lol. Let's not even talk about how when you want something for a specific image and when you go to see if you have it, out of 1000s of options of content you got...you don't have that one specific object so you have to model it anyway.
Who else deals with this? I've gotten to a point where I manage more of my content than actually using it!
Yep, and I must admit when I first got into Daz it was a situation I never thought I'd find myself in.
Now the thing that really gets me is that of the stuff I own, I haven't used half of it, and I'm still adding to it!
...
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Actuallty, I don't mind the choices so much b/c I remember the 'old days' when there was little content. Some people categorize but I find that too tedious with the scads of content facing me now. I'm a browser, not a searcher, so breaking up my content main categories into seperate libraries helps.
The most (seriously THE most) useful new utility for DAZ is the bookmark feature https://www.daz3d.com/mf-content-bookmarks So you can bookmark most used or fave content folders, or those used for a project (that you can dump later). It gives you a bookmark menu and ability to bookmark a folder. Then you can use Studio's own menu editing ability to create submenus, rename, etc.
I just split out two more categories to a separate drive - shaders (and shader presets) and billboards. I already had tutorials split out. Shaders and billboards freed up 52 GB(!) on the main content drive.
I've been using multiple hard drives for years now. Fortunatately the high-storage external drives keep getting bigger and cheaper, so I've got a massive stack of them that I keep upgrading, with most of my DAZ and Poser libraries split across three 6TB drives, two 4tbs and my internal 5TB RAID.