Well, I just suffered a 4th catastrophic loss of my Acer Swift 3 computer in the past two years. So it is back to the drawing board yet AGAIN. This time the submicroscopic pins inside the battery cable bent/broke when I went to install a new battery, and that is impossible to fix without a repair shop. This is the only laptop I've encountered in 30 years that will not run on A/C power when no battery is connected. So that laptop is headed for the dumpster. Thanks a lot for wasting two years of my life with that stylish piece of high-maintenance garbage, Acer Computers.

So I now have two (pretty weak and pathetic) computers remaining. I would like to put my active Daz Content on an external drive, so I can install/update to just one place, and then plug that drive into whichever computer I'm running Daz on at the moment. That'll free up a lot of space on the computers' internal drives, too. In theory, I could use two external drives to run Daz on both machines, if I have a large project with many renders to do.

But we're talking about Daz Studio here, so I have to ask... can I really just do something that simple? Or will I experience unexpected "problems", Daz style?

My goal is to label it Drive Z on any computers that will use it, so I won't have to change the drive letter and have the new computer search for everything all over again. Has anyone done this before, and did it work?

Also, any recommendations on using a portable hard drive versus a portable SSD drive, in terms of loading/rendering speed and such? I'd prefer a hard drive for stability and longevity and cost, but not if it takes an extra half hour to load each Genesis 8 character.

I already have the entire Daz and 3rd Party content folders backed up elsewhere. I learned that lesson on Acer Crash #3. So I'm hoping this will just be a Copy, Configure, and Run operation.

Any info/tips/experiences/suggestions appreciated!

Paul

The main issue would be the database - installing on one machine would not add references to the other, nor would files saved on one machine appear on the other. You can save user data before switching, then reimport metadata on arrival to match them up; it might work to have the database on the removable drive too.

Is the database a file, or a collection of files? I'm not sure how that is set up or where it is located. I know I would have to manually move the .DUF files I create (scenes, etc) between computers (or store them on the external drive). I assume the database is something very different though...?

Thanks!

Paul

The database is a large collection of files - by default in %appadata%/daz 3d/cms/contentcluster/ for Windows. Its location can be set in Install Manager (Gear icon>Advanced settings) and in Daz Studio (Edit>preferences>CMS Settings). Do not back it up or move it untill all applications using the database are fuilly closed.

Just weighing in to say that sharing the Daz content on a shared drive is quite possible. I have DAZ Studio installed on both my Mac and a Windows PC and use a network storage drive for all the assets. Since I am very much a Mac user I tend to purchase and install all my assets via the Mac but obviously the Windows machine is much better at doing the actual Rendering.

This setup works fine - although I am sure it is a bit slower than using native drives. However, as Richard has said installing on one machine obviously does not update the database on the second machine so you will have to do the re-import meta data on the second machine.  Unfortuantely, Daz does not have a way of only displaying the products by date on that window and so I tend to just re-import everything - which for my setup and asset count takes about 10 minutes.  Not tried moving the database to the network drive tho as that would probably lead to corruption in my setup if I am running both machines at the same time.

One thing to watch out for - maybe just limited to my setup with a Mac and windows machine and network drive - is that I have had a few Products with "broken" installs due to certain characters used in the file or path names. Not dug into them to find out if the actual package is wrong or just not compatible with my setup but something to maybe watch out for.

Thanks to both of you. Since I'm starting fresh (again) I'm tempted to try moving the database to the shared drive as well, if only as a test before going back to the usual setup. However, I got a great Black Friday deal on a 2TB internal SSD today. So it makes more sense now to just install that as a permanent 2nd drive and put the Daz content (and all my home recording studio content) there, leaving the Daz database where it is. At least I'll have a relatively empty boot drive that way. I guess I'll just have to install new content on each computer separately. That's a little tedious, but it should reduce the likelihood of unpleasant Daz surprises.

SofaCitizen: I have several "broken" installs as well. In fact, my "Lost and Found" is the most populated category in Smart Content - really frustrating. I doubt it is specific to your machine or setup. More likely, either the metadata wasn't set up correctly (or at all) or, as you said, I've seen some files with misspellings or incorrect paths. I installed "Autumn Cottage" a few months ago, and it only crashes Daz Studio - that's ALL it does, nothing else. Only one other content item has ever done that on my system. Yet others who saw my video about that report that Autumn Cottage works just fine for them. It's a mystery.

I don't know why Daz doesn't catch (or simply allows) these problems for stuff sold at the Daz Store. Daz's quality control reminds me of Gibson's - most Gibson guitars are phenomenal out of the box. But sometimes they ship an instrument that is so flawed, mangled and defective, you wonder if everyone involved in building, testing and packaging it was blindfolded and drunk.

But at least Gibson never gave me a guitar as a gift, and then told me I was no longer entitled to it a year later, but was welcome to purchase it from them, like Daz did with all the "free gifts" they gave me when I first signed up with them one year ago. That was truly despicable.

Thanks again for the responses, both of you,

Paul

Ahh, well the specific broken items I was refering to do happen to be in lost and found but have no name, a filesize of 0 bytes, a creation and modification date of Monday 1st of January 1601 12:00am - I think that was a little before Daz Studio was made so certainly a little bit wrong. They do have the Product listed against them so there is a clue to where they came from. Files with unsupported characters are the usual cuplrit but I have not had time to track down all of them so there may be others.

The general lost and found issue is still annoying tho and will affect anyone that uses the Smart Content. It would be nice if the QA started to include that in their workflow to block products with missing metadata since it does rather defeat the purpose of having Smart Content if some items would not appear in it.

To add to your frustration I also have the Autumn Cottage and can confirm it opens fine on both my machines. Not done any renders with it yet but it does not crash Daz when I open it.

As for the other thing about the free gifts being taken away, that is not something I have knowledge about. I've only really been using Daz for about 6 months or so so have not witnessed anything like that. I do have DIM set to retain the downloaded ZIPs so I should probably back those up somewhere just in case.

I do have backups of the "gifts" that Daz took away. But technically, Daz now considers me to not own them. For example, in Daz Central, the only option for those products is "Uninstall" (since they're already installed). Every other item I have installed has the "Open" option. Daz actually SOLD me one of those "gifts" (Dolly) before I realized what they had done. So that one shows up normally like any other product.

I'll have to try Autumn Cottage again. I think vendors sometimes make minor changes, so you never know what version you're downloading. I might just have a version that doesn't work. I have a bedroom also that gives me a missing file error for the dresser only, yet everyone else says that works fine for them. Gotta love the consistency.

As for your items from the year 1601 -  I think you have the King James versions.

Hello, I recommend to always keep a copy of your DAZ Products stored somewhere, from the daz website you can download the .zip file for each licensed product in the format IM[numbers].zip and install it with DAZ Install Manager. This way the smart content works fine and you will not have problems, you need to reinstall the content of course on your local machine for better performance. When you have a lot of contents the difficult part is to choose what to install time to time (unless you want to install everything every time). Disclaimer: I am the author of the app DSX Catalog

Hello, I recommend to always keep a copy of your DAZ Products stored somewhere, from the daz website you can download the .zip file for each licensed product in the format IM[numbers].zip and install it with DAZ Install Manager. This way the smart content works fine and you will not have problems, you need to reinstall the content of course on your local machine for better performance. When you have a lot of contents the difficult part is to choose what to install time to time (unless you want to install everything every time). Disclaimer: I am the author of the app DSX Catalog