I guess you might say I've had my share of hard drive troubles lately. I had a disk crash a few weeks ago. I've never had that much luck with restoring an entire disk from a backup and once again had to reinstall Windows and all my software from scratch. Since my runtime had become rather messy and unwieldy, I decided to reinstall my various Poser related products from scratch. Well ... about a 1/3 way through the process, my drive crashed again. Now I'm up again. In fact I went out and bought some new-fangled backup software that will, hopefully, give me more ability to restore the entire drive than the old stuff did ... But anyway, I do have that 1/3 progress I made backed up, and I have had some luck restoring from that backup on a file-by-file basis. So my question is, do I have to reinstall all my Poser products again from scratch, or can I simply restore the entire Runtime directory I have backed up, i.e., this would be restore to a different directory because that's pretty much how the old backup software insists on doing it when restoring on a file-by-file basis, and then copy all those files over/into the existing Runtime directory? Thanks for your opinion.

Depending on whether or not the pathnames are full or partial, you will either have to place everything in the same path it was in before, or just point Poser (5 or 6, you didn't mention which you have, but it sounds like you're running one or the other) at the new runtime. I don't think you'll have to reinstall anything, unless the actual files got corrupted.

I just realized that maybe I can zip up the fresh runtime first, then do the copy and if things don't work out, hopefully I could just delete everything and unzip the previous runtime and then proceed to re-install as necessary ... I'm using Poser 6. Actually, haven't done much with it, but I hope to do a little something if I can just find the time and energy. Anyway, thanks.

You also can try Robocopy (in Windows Resource Kit tools. Don't have the link handy, but if you search for rktools on msdn.microsoft.com you'll probably find it). It's like XCopy on steroids - lots of steroids. I use it to backup entire runtimes over the network.

One of the things which Poser does rather well is cope with multiple runtimes. So reinstall Poser, put your old runtime in it's own directory, and point Poser at it. The one thing I've noticed where you might need to do a bit more fiddling is in the Materials room, when assigning a texture. The Browse button seems to default to starting in the main P6 runtime's textures folder. You don't need to routinely backup all the runtime. Libraries, textures, and geometries are the critical sub-folders, and I see I've accumulated a few variations on "readme".

Thanks again. Anybody know if there are any utilities that let you compare 2 runtimes and delete any duplicate files from one of those runtimes?

Hmm. I think Robocopy can do that. Must look up the manual....