Keep DAZ Purchased Files Local?
Freddy
Posts: 33
in The Commons
Quck question.. do you guys keep your files local? I have a TON of stuff I've purchased and realizing that it takes up a LOT of hard drive space. I'm okay for now but just wondering.. is there another way? It would be nice if it was all cloud stored until you need something.
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In short, there is a trade off between space and speed. Hard disk space is relatively cheap and high speed while cloud storage is slow and expensive. Moreover, daz studio makes extensive uses of databases in organizing which is not very compatible with the organization of cloud storage. Is it possible? yes. Is it wise? Probably not.
Also note that DS does not suport UNC paths - any network location must be mapped to a local drive/folder for use
I have two 8TB hard drives for my DAZ content. One is a backup of the other.
Given that Daz reads most every data file you possess (for that generation) whenever you create a genesis N figure, putting it on a cloud would be horribly slow. The way Turbo Loader works is it hides some files from Daz to cut down on load time.
I just use SSD and when they start to get a bit low, I buy another, larger one and copy everything across. It takes a bit of looking, but I've still got most of the stuff I've downloaded over the past 20 years, in my "downloads" SSD. I even found a lovely bamboo "office equipment box" it turns out to be a stand for SSD boxes. It will hold up to 9 SSD standing virtically.
I keep installed products on internal SSD drives; I also keep the downloaded install files - the primary (used for installation) on internal SSD with two backups on external USB drives. There's always the possibiliity of Daz hanging it up and going away - or more likely, for me - my internet access becoming limited.
Like others, I keep all of my content zip files but I keep as few installed files as needed on my boot drive (C:). I use DIM and install the base software on my boot drive, but all installed content to a 5 TB external HDD. Like Ron, I have another 5 TB external HDD to which I manually install the content so that I have a backup ready to go. I had to use it two years ago when I dropped the main HDD; I simply brought the backup HDD into service. I bought another 5 TB HDD to replace it so that I had a backup HDD again.
I keep the content zip files on a third external HDD; it was a 5 TB drive but that was almost completely full a year or so ago, so I bought a 20 TB eternal drive for the zip files.
My advice is to save everything, store installed content on an eternal drive and buy as big an external drive (HDD or SSD) as you can comfortably afford for archive (zipped files) storage.
I personally never trust a cloud-only copy of important files, e.g. files I paid money for. Daz has been awesome about ensuring access to old purchases, but I've seen other stores selectively remove access, go out of business, or have unplanned service outages.
For digital assets I recommend downloading a backup copy to a portable USB drive. Seagate or Western Digital are well known brands.
For daily use, Daz Studio runs best when assets are installed to an internal SSD - lots of models and textures to go fetch, so not having to wait for an HDD to spin its platters saves a lot of time.
I can only say that anytime an OS has in its infinite wisdom elected to hijack my C: drive DAZ content that must stay where installed to the cloud, disaster happens and I lose valuable time cleaning up the mess created. And I don't know how many times I have told my OS not to use the Cloud.
I have multiple external hard drives, from 24Tb to 5Tb for different machines to store my different products depending on purchase sources. And have back-up drives.
The only cloud I use is Google Drive to document product's charts, thumbnails, renders I have had to make, notes from the forum on tutorials..., and personal files. And those are downloaded as Excel or Word files periodically. But no record of passwords or accounts are recorded on those files. I keep that to a manual thumbdrive, I then delete after I am done with why I needed it.
...I keep my head out of the cloud so I can think clearer. ;-)
Actually my old system is slow enough so I don't need to make the response even worse as I only have a cable connection since my building doesn't have Fibre Optic to the street.
Also the other day there was an outage as well which lasted for a while
Some cloud-networked pcs have been not only compromised by hackers but operated by hackers. The cloud consists of a hoard of networked PCs located across the globe and some have system vulnerabilitities. . In the past I had servers. Still do they are in a closet. I could provide a cloud server so could any of you. Should and could we trust eachother with pertinent data? I trust very few with my personal data so cloud is a big no for me. I own and use a truckload of SSDs 8TB x4 6TB x2 4TBx8 2TB x10. And a huge bin of mechanocal drives. So my cloud cluster is local drives.
Edit: Just stumbled on this: An interesting article dated March 10 2026 atrributing 44.5% of cloud breaches to software vulnerabilities whereas it used to be weak credentials 27.2%..
...not here.
My system is ancient with 24 GB of memory a Maxwell Titan-X GPU (now in Nvidia "depreciated" status) running on an old 6 core 2.9 GHz Xeon on an X58 MB where both the "C" (240 GB) and "D" (2 TB) drives are near capacity, which is all on a 300 mbps cable connection.
The "bad place" could possibly freeze over by the time your files opened.