DIM Archive Question
Jason Galterio
Posts: 2,562
My downloaded products now top 2.5 TBs, making it not reasonable to keep the archive on a "live" drive. So my download directory is on an external drive. (Which is a headache for downloading, but that's another story.)
I also have two computers where I do my DS work; a desktop and a laptop.
I am trying to figure out if there are any potential issues with using the external drive on two machines with two different installations of DIM.
I don't think there will be, since the machine specific information looks to be contained in the installation directories.
The only time data seems to be written to the download directory is when DIM is online and connected to the internet?
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Based on what I experienced with my laptop, I wouldn't recommend it if you plan in connecting other stuff to that particular USB port. My Windows 7 Ultimate laptop had a habit of changing drive letters on the same external hard drive, possibly due to plugging in different drives on the same port, but I'm not 100% sure on that reason. If you insist on doing that, my advice would be to make sure you dedicate the USB port on the desktop & the laptop for that external drive alone(i.e. don't be plugging in different drives on those same ports).
Another option is you can back up the product packages on an external hard drive separate from DIM and delete the packages that are installed on your system in DIM. I don't know the correct process for this, but they can be backed up in this manner so you don't have to redownload everything in order to reinstall the products. Given the size of your library, I would make a list of the packages you have installed because some products have multiple packages that do not need to have all of them installed.
I've done the removeable external drive shtick on Win XP, Win 7 pro, Win 8.1 pro, and Win 10 pro. Never had an issue with drive letters; I assign drive letters to all my externals. They keep the letter no matter what port on the computer I've defined them on. I just have to do it to every new drive as I install them - it's part of my process that incldes disabling indexing and windows recycling.
DIM uses the content manifest folder to track what items are installed. You can access content in multiple pcs from a shared location so long as you use only one DIM to install content. If you intend to use DIM on multiple pcs then you may have to use a shared location for the manifest folder. DS on the other hand, mainly uses the cms for tracking installed content. However, it can still "see" the content from shared paths, but won't be able to use cms related functionalites (custom categories, smart content, db search).
You can host the cms directory from a shared folder but it would allow only one DS PostgreSQL instance to be running at any given instant. DS isn't designed to serve a hub-n-spoke kind of access despite using a rdbms for the cms.
That's probably why I was having that issue then. All I was doing was just plugging the drive into the USB port and using it "as is". Usually it would consistently use the same letter for the drive, but when I start plugging it into a different USB port, and/or plugging in different drives, then it will change on me.
So far I don't hear anything that worries me. Specifcally...
My downloaded archives are on an external drive which is permenantly assigned the same drive letter on both machines.
Only one machine accesses the download archive at a time.
Only one machine runs DIM and downloads updates. Both machines run DIM to install content locally to their own internal storage,
I used to have the archive locally on the desktop, but the drive space it needs has grown into something unmanagable. I don't have the internal space to add another drive.