Loading up a new PC from a dead one
chris-2599934
Posts: 1,798
Earlier this month my faithful Daz rig died, taking the C: drive with it. Fortunately I have off-site backups that should let me get back most of the personal files I had on it, and all my Daz products were stored on an external drive that is still OK.
So, I now have a shiny new PC and, first things first, I want to get Daz up and running.
I've installed Install Manager (Daz really want you to load Daz Central, but cobblers to that), and then installed Daz Studio itself. I've changed the content directories in DIM and Studio to get My Daz3d Library from the external drive, and that seems to work fine when getting things from the content library.
What I'm not seeing is anything in Smart Content (which I rarely use, but still want), and DIM thinks all the products I've bought still need to be downloaded. I guess I could download them all again, but there are over 7000 of them, and I'm gonna be spending enough time downloading my backup. Is there any way to short-cut the process?
Note that I have not yet started downloading my backup, so if there's stuff in it that I should be prioritising, let me know!
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Comments
It depends. Where was your content database stored? On teh external drive or on your now defunct drive in the old PC?
Sorry, don't have a solution to your problem as I'm installing everything manually and not touching any of the installers or the database (again), but...
I am surpriced how easily people seem to accept the idea that they should download their content again when the "Smart" content has lost the metadata... Downloading gigabytes after gigabytes of stuff because a few kilobytes were not found in the location the "Smart" content manager thought it should be...
I think it was on the defunct drive - the only thing on the external was the "My Daz3D Library" and its children. Where would the database normally be found?
I'm not accepting that idea easily, that's why I'm here!
Have you tried reimporting metadata (on the Content Library context menu under Content DB Maintenance)? That should restore your Smart Content for products that were installed with DIM. DIM puts the metadata in Runtime/Support, so that should still be available on your external drive. Also, if you login from Daz Studio, Daz Connect should update metadata for your products, even if they were installed with DIM.
The database is stored in your user appdata folder by default, so probably on your C drive, unless you specifically chose another CMS database folder in the Daz preferences.
As far as DIM forgetting what you had installed, that is controlled by the manifest files. Do you remember where you had configured DIM to store the Manifest Archive? Maybe you still have them.
Normally in appdata. You will likely need to reinstall through DIM to get Smart Content back.
I'm making progress with my rebuild.
Install Manager gets its information on what's installed or not by looking at lots of little files in C:\Users\Public\Documents\DAZ 3D\InstallManager\ManifestFiles. Restore those, and DIM can just pick up where it left off.
For the content database within Daz Studio, I needed to copy the contents of C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\cms from the old machine to the new one. This seems to have got smart content working again, and also restored my custom categories (which is a big relief).
The only downside was that I started getting a message when I launched studio saying "Configuration of the system has changed. To use content installed using Daz Connect, the content owner must re-authenticate." Of course, it doesn't give any clues as to how this re-authentication might take place, but it turns out that going to Connect > Login... in the menu, logging in, and letting it update the metadata does the trick. More discoveries as I find them...