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First of all, I am kinda new to the group, so Hi... I do have a small issue and was wondering if someone could help.
I have a butt load of content, all just dropped in my content folder... yes, I know, I am very unorganized. I did have all my originals and zips and stuff stored on an external drive but some punk stole it. So, I was wondering, is there a way to go thru my content and runtime folder and repackage or somehow sort the content??Well thanks, what I figured. But you never know, someone might have screwed up like I did and got it all back
If it's a DAZ product, you may be able to go to the Help Wiki on their website and search through the Documentation Section for the Readme. Midway through each product page, you'll find a link labeled File List. If the product isn't too old, the file list will tell you what is contained in the zip. That would be a lot of work, though.
I find it helpful to check the readme file on Rendo and for Daz, doing a Google search with "doc daz" at the beginning and then the product name/number. If you're lucky you'll get the help page with a working link to the file list. That'll let you rebuild the files from what you have in your runtime. It's A LOT of work, though. It would certainly be easier to download what you've lost, provided they aren't hard to find items.
Not hard, just time consuming. I have lost back up discs before. Most of the time I re-download the content. A few things, I have done a manual extraction by going to rendo or daz and getting the file list. Unfortunately external drives dont seem to last as long as they used to.
In the Runtime folder there's a folder called Support, the .dsx files have a list of the items in the package, you could use that to find the files for each package and separate them. =)
Bare in mind, that will only work for things that came from Daz, and were zip files, some exe's have them, but they would have to be the more recent exe's.
Fully possible, time consuming as mentioned and to what extent depends how big your runtime actually is. Some people are under the impression they have a gigantic Runtime around 250gb or so until they cross path with the dude who has 8-10TB.
However, there are tools that will ease this process a lot for you. Get "Content Gatherer" and "DAZ Advanced Library Manager". The latter is available for free the other you can find here. Google is your friend.
There are many different ways to approach this but focus on the tools they provide for analyzing your products installed and what references they have. Use the "Installation Helper" utility available in Advanced Library to analyze your runtime.
Exporting your product items becomes quite easy with Content Gatherer once you have a good overview where your main product files are at and which products you actually have installed. Content Gatherer will do the most time consuming work automatically for you and can export out the complete directory structure for your items. If you want to repackage them as DIM use "Content Package Assist" you can find it here also.
Also, unless you manually deleted. Every item what you have installed in your runtime using the DIM app will have their index files sitting on your harddrive (is a cleartext file with all metadata for your product and all files and paths for it) if u have a little coding or scripting skills with Python for instance, you could automate a parser that will "regenerate" all those back to zip files with correct folder structures etc.
Could recommend P3dO Explorer here also, but for full functionality u need to buy a pro license. The version available here is old and obsolete and the free version lacks the functions that would be of any greater help in this case. Its well worth the money though if u ask me.
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