Running Daz studio on an offline machine
I gather this is possible, although I'm having trouble finding the forum post I read where some one outlined how they do it.
I think I basically just need to use a separate machine with DIM installed on it to download the files, then transfer them to the offline machine. Then the DIM on the offline machine will find them once they are in the downloads folder and can install them.
Manually installed content is probably not a problem?
Does daz studio itself ever need to access the internet to run? Are there any gotchas I'm missing here?
I have a few reasons I want to be offline, the most important being I don't want Windows updates breaking the software after I have it setup. Basically I don't really trust Windows.
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Why not just urn off Windows updates?
No.
I've been doing it for years.
I download with DIM to an external USB drive, then move the drive to the off-line system and run DIM in off-line mode to install. Keep the downloads on the USB drive so the online system DIM knows what you have, will notify you about updates, and won't keep trying to download the same products over and over.
Thanks, good info about preventing future unnecessary downloads. This is the kind of workflow I was thinking of as well.
I see there are "offline installers" and "DIM" installers for some content on the shop. I assume a similar workflow for offline or manual install could work as well. Daz Connect sounded like it might be more complicated but from reading daz connect isn't really required, interferes with DIM sometimes and some people feel it's buggy and unreliable.
DIM is incredibly flexible; Central is a stripped down DIM that just doesn't have much flexibility - and Connect doesn't do software, handles plugins badly (if it does them at all - I don't remember) and breaks most scripted products. You could do manual install, but most (all?) plugins need to be installed by DIM or Central - they're not available as stand-alone installers.
I do have a separate install directory for third-party products (sharecg, rendo- and render- and the like) that I do all manual installs to; DIM doesn't need to know about this one). Right now my dim-download directory is using 1.9 TB on my USB drive (16,400 items). You really only need to configure the Downloads tab on the online system DIM; the offline system should have a matching Downloads configuration (with the appropriate drive letter for the archive directories) and the full configuration of the Installation tab.
I've been using this since about two days after DIM came out.
Instead of going through all that, as was already pointed out, just disable Windows Updates. Doing this will not affect updates for Windows Defender. It was one of the things I requested when I had my system built. If and when I do need to update, I can just turn it back on, do the updates, and then disable it again.
We cannot turn off Windows Updates. We can delay them, but not stop them. And the other day the computer was acting like it had been updated again withOUT notifying in its usual fashion
I've been doing this for years out of necessity - my internet access from home was dial-up until 2019. So I took a laptop to a free wifi outlet (Starbucks) and downloaded there - not just Daz content; I also grabbed the occasional YouTube video to watch at home. In 2019 I had to go to a portable wifi hotspot as the last dial-up outlet I could find shut down. For half again as much money I got something close to twice my dial-up download speed - with a 13 GB/month data cap. So I kept going to Starbucks.
A regional telco ran fiber past my house in 2019 and I was hooked up in November - 100 Mb up/down with no data cap for the same monthly payment. This saved my sanity when the covid lockdowns kicked in.
My main system is still off-line; there's no real reson to change. Its still running Windows 7 Ultimate but I do have an upgrade plan for Windows 10 pro when I need to do it. It'll still be an off-line system after the upgrade.
I also have my main rendering computer off-line for protection from updates, viruses, etc. I think it is great. However, you must remember to deal with other things manually. The most needed (about once a year) is to update my graphic card driver(s) - nicely, Nvidia makes it an easy download that can transfer to the other computer.
Thanks for the tips guys.
This might be sort of off topicish, but how hard is it to get Daz Install Manager to run on linux through wine (or anything else)? It occurs to me I might not even need Windows for the download portion. There's some guides I'm looking into on this topic but they mostly are struggling with running daz studio itself which I've resolved to run on Windows offline.