Solved: Safely running Beta build for the first time

paulawp (marahzen)

Call me crazy, but IRL, I am a software support professional. Among the particularly harrowing things in my life are new releases and anything that has a chance of affecting the "production" instance. I'd really like to try Face Transfer 2, only available today in the beta build, but in my relatively brief Daz career, I have never used the public/beta build of Daz. I'm starting this thread to confirm the proper and safe steps - and any special considerations - involved in installing that. I briefly surveyed the  items here in Daz Studio Discussion and there doesn't seem to be an open, brief, current thread about simply how to install beta and basic, important considerations that may apply to relatively recent Daz version users. Hopefully it will be a service to anyone else in the same spot.

I have located the Beta product in the store:  Daz Studio Pro BETA | Daz 3D

On that page, it specifically warns users of 4.8 of a content DB issue. I'd like to confirm if there are issues confronting people running 4.21, like me, or other common recent versions like 4.15 that many are using for their main production Daz instance.

Are there any meaningful changes to the steps illustrated on that page in the (long) time since that product page was created?

Thanks! I don't want to seem paranoid, but I don't want to gratuitously break a happy and healthy Daz instance over it.

crosswind

Though this ever confused me ~~ IF YOU ARE UPGRADING FROM DAZ STUDIO 4.8, IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED THAT YOU BACKUP YOUR CONTENT DATABASE IN DAZ STUDIO 4.8 BEFORE LAUNCHING DAZ STUDIO 4.10! ~~ ( still there... and can a 4.10 could be acquired now?)

I started to use DS since GR 4.10 and PB since 4.11, so there's never been any issue in terms of intalling / updating Public Build since then. So, I don't think there'll be any problem on your side. It's almost the same as installing a General Release.

One reminder: if you have some installed plug-ins in GR, you need to re-install them for PB, as well as Default Resources, etc . etc. I could not recall all...

Richard Haseltine

The actual database tables changed in 4.9, which was also the version that introduced Daz Connect. The betas should coexist with the general reelases as they have their own setings in most respects (certainly content directories - which means you an have it use a different database by seting a different content cluster location - and application settings).

paulawp (marahzen)

Thanks, I was able to test successfully with no special steps.