Moving my Daz content to a thumb drive...?

screitz_b955c799dd

I have a project I have been working on back and forth between my home and work computers. I had the .duf files I was building being saved to dropbox or iCloud. My content library has been the default on both my Macs. When I work on one machine and save the file, then move to the other, I find myself having to spend time "finding"  textures that are now disconnected.

If I move my entire content library and project files to an external thumbdrive (USB-C) can I avoid having this trouble of always having to find and reconnect textures? The idea, of course, being to just use that drive on whatever machine I am working at.

Richard Haseltine

That sounds as if you may have nested content directories (one folder set as a content directory inside another folder set as a content directory) on one machine, which confuses Daz Studio when it is trying to save a relative path for assets (it stores the location within the content directory only, not the location of the content directory - with nested content directori4s it has two possible starting points)

screitz_b955c799dd

Richard Haseltine said:

That sounds as if you may have nested content directories (one folder set as a content directory inside another folder set as a content directory) on one machine, which confuses Daz Studio when it is trying to save a relative path for assets (it stores the location within the content directory only, not the location of the content directory - with nested content directori4s it has two possible starting points)

An interesting thought. How would I check that? I have always let Daz manage where files are kept. To be clearer, it is really third-party assets like textures I bring in that probably cause the problems. Those I keep in the same dropbox folder, but when I launch Daz Studio on the different machines,  always have to relocate those specific assets. Perhaps if I knew a fool-proof place to locate those kinds of files so that it works acress machines...?

hansolocambo

so that it works acress machines...?

As long as the folder structure of your Library(ies) is good. You can share that same library(ies) with another computer. Where it's stored does not matter : locally, on a mapped cloud drive, on an USB key, on your phone's SIM card connected in Wifi to your PC, etc. it will work.

In a Daz library there are only 2 mandatory folders : Runtime. Data. That you should temper with only if you know what you're doing.

The rest, files and folders, can be named and placed literally wherever you want them to be, as long as it's in "a" Daz library added to your Content Directory Manager.

Example : you buy a Daz bundle. That has a data folder, a Runtime folder, and a people folder.

You can have the people folder with a .duf file in a library on your MEGA cloud mapped drive, calling a .dsf file in the data folder of another library on your USB key, calling Runtime/Textures located on another computer on the network : it will work. As long as all folders strucure are consistent with what Daz understands and as long as all libraries are added to your Content Directory Manager, "where is what" doesn't matter. Countless threads of people terrified about moving their libraries around. When it's actually one of the great things with Daz : you can put libraries absolutely anywhere.

And yes you can put your library on a thumb drive and move it around to be able to work on any computer that has Daz and the Starter Essentials installed.

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You probably apply textures but don't save material presets or objects properly ? I guess that's why you have to locate missing files manually.