Cleaning Up My Hard-Drive of Old Content
sandmanmax
Posts: 992
I just realized my content drive was running out of space, so I thought I would review some of the stuff I've got out there. This includes what's left of my original content folder, as of a year and half before the last time my hard-drive crashed and I rebuilt the whole content structure into separate runtimes. And a complete Poser Pro 2014 content library. Most of what's left in the Daz/Studio/Content runtime is older stuff (Victoria 3/ Michael 3, even Victoria 2) which I haven't used in years. Lots of 3Delight stuff, which I hate. Ever since Iray came out, I haven't used 3Delight for anything. I don't even know most of what's in the Poser Pro 2014 content directory because I only used Poser after Victoria 4 came out. The other duplication is all the Poser runtime content in my main DAZ content libraries - so many hair packs that came with both DAZ shader and Poser shaders, Genesis and Genesis 2 stuff that installed into both DAZ content and Poser content, 3Delight shaders and light sets, etc. So I'm trying to convince myself to nuke all the stuff I don't think I'm ever going to use again. But the little voice inside my head whispers "But what if you need it for something?"
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Comments
If it's stuff from DAZ, if you ever needed it, you could download it again. Could you archive it by burning to dvd or flash drive or something?
Gus
If you had it categorized, then even if you were to download it again you would have to go through the effort of re-categorizing it. Perhaps not an issue if you don't use categories though.
Although I've not used converters from 3DL to Iray, presumably you have the option of applying iray shaders to 3DL objects (although perhaps with extra work, some research here would be good) which would give you many additional objects that you might not otherwise have.
Also watch out for products where you might want part of it; for example a pack that has clothing and poses. Even if you didn't want the clothing anymore you might still want the poses.
On the flip side, if you know for a fact you don't want it installed but could archive it and reinstall it later from your backups with minimal effort if you change your mind, then having less content to look through might speed up your workflow.
External hard-drive is great for backing up content assets
Hmmm... now that's a thought. Technically, it's all backed up but I'd have to trust the back-up system, which has a sketchy success rate. Although it did restore that ill-fated year-and-a-half old copy of my content directory. And I used to burn all the install packs to data disks until I got bored, so I guess I'm covered. And I'm sure I've got the original downloads for Poser Pro 2014. I found all the earlier ones [shaking head.... along with every working memory chip I ever removed from a computer and my last two video cards...yeah, it's pack-rat central here.] Onwards to free up space on my content drive.... afterall, there's new stuff to buy.
Good ideas... and inspired me to go check my backups - on an external drive
- and found out I had excluded Poser Pro native content (I guess figuring I could always reinstall it). Anyway, I now have a nice fresh backup and can nuke the main one. I kind of figured I'd go thru the old content directory and see what I thought might be useful (nix Victoria 2, keep Victoria 3 - there are some characters I really like and have been unsuccessful at converting to newer generations). And I didn't think about converting 3DL shaders to Iray. If nothing else, it can all get sorted out and put into the current runtimes. I don't use the categories - just old-school Content Library. It mirrors my hard-drive and I can (well, mostly, which is half the problem) find what I'm looking for. Thanks y'all.
Go to the drive, or folder properties and "Compress folders and files"... Select, "Yes" to compressing sub-folders, if it asks. It is non-destructive compression, not like zipping files up. Daz compresses a LOT, due to all the tiny files of nothing, within all the folders. You may gain back 50% to 60% of your wasted space that way. No need to uninstall anything. It is not actual compression. It just throws small files into one sector, instead of taking-up one sector per file and blank files get reduced to "nothing", as they are just blank files. Daz has a few of those too.
Most files are just text files. Many contain nothing more than a few words. Like links that just have to exist, for daz to display things in the content. But each file takes-up 4KB (4,096 bytes), even if it is just a text file with the letter "A" in it, which is one byte. This is because each sector is 4KB. When you compress the folders, files that are small like that, are all crammed into one single sector and a mini-directory is made, pointing to the sections in that sector or sectors, that contain the small files. Thus, you reduce 4096 files with only the letter "A", or nothing in them... from 16,777,216 bytes (16,777KB), into only 4KB. But it does that for every small file, where it can manage to do it, for a large space-saving gain. Less for larger files.
Oh wow!! I tested it on a couple of files in my temp folder just to see what would happen. That is SO cool! But why didn't it compress a dinky html file? It's only 641 bytes. It shows as compressed (the double-blue arrows on the icon) but when I look at the properties, it still shows it taking 4KB on my hard-drive. Something to do with all the mark-up stuff (whatever it's called - I'm no web-developer)?
IIRC how this stuff works, that's how files are stored on a computer's hard drive — space is allocated in chunks of 4KB. Even a zero-length file has a "size" of 4KB.
Nope. Zero-size file allocates 0 bytes, on any filesystem, because they have no allocation descriptors.
Theremore, on NTFS until file grow too much, it's data resides in MFT record. And does not occupy any additional space, in fact.
MFT recors size, usually, 1KB in size, so it possible to store about 300-400 bytes inside MFTr residently. Even data compressable and compession activated -- limit grows.
NTFS compression is subject to use from i486 CPUs. It reduces IO amount to access, brings some CoW advantages to NTFS and make more disk space to use. Dont know, why MS still not make it default.
My linux installation also possible to compress files. Fresh DAZ installation with only essentials have good compressratio 1.36, and it only on LZ4. Maybe, with good CPU, gzip-9 make sense with it too.