How to manage Smart Content (remove, change drives, etc)?

aaráribel caađo

I'm getting a new, faster drive to put my 3D content on, but it won't have room for everything, so I want to split things across to drives, with stuff I use most frequently on the faster one. Is there a way to manage the move so I keep my smart content? I've done a lot of work with a large amount of 3rd party products to ensure they're in my smart content the way I want, so I don't want to lose that. And I have some duplicates I want to get rid of. 

Is it possible to split content over several folders without losing metadata? And can old metadata be removed? Some of the stuff I've made but deleted still has blank icons. 

Any tips or links to guides on doing this would be deeply appreciated!

Richard Haseltine

As long as the files are still in the correct place relative to the content directory the system doesn't care where the content directory is, or how many content directories there are.

aaráribel caađo

Can I split up content directories? I'd like to keep less used files on the old drive and not always plug it in (using a laptop, so fewer things plugged in = less chance of inadvertantly unplugging something)

Richard Haseltine

Yes

aaráribel caađo

Thank you!

Richard Haseltine

I should point out that having a lot of different content directories can slow loading down (when trying to load a file DS matches the relative path, the location within the content directory, against each content directory in turn until it finds the file or runs out of directories to check). I'm not sure if it still does, but DS used to warn about the potential perfomance impact on adding a tenth or eleventh directory - I don't think what you are proposing would be enough to trigger a problem, though of course there can be a lot of files to check for something like a Genesis figure.

aaráribel caađo

Thanks for that extra info. I hope the files I push off the the used directories are ones I rarely use, so I'm mostly keeping them as back-ups.