I moved everything to an archiving drive. I would say there are 3 kinds of files you need to worry about.
1 would be everything you download should be in a folder, that's basic.
to make it easier to recover after loosing your data (such as moving to a new drive), I make copies of what files I will actually be installing, which come in 2 flavors. There are the nice pre zipped and packaged IMG files, and the not so nice "extract and paste" files.
I find with the img files, I like to make copies of them and put them in a folder called, 'files for installer'. The idea is that with this folder, if you have to clear daz or move drives, and you need to reinstall everything, you can use the installer to redownload all the normal things you have bought through the daz store (so you don't need to keep a copy of these downloads, but you should know what folder they are saved to). If you know where the downloads are, you can copy the 'files for installer' files into the same download folder, and then install everything at once.
for the 'extract and paste' files, I do something similar, where I make a special folder, extract all my favorite files into it, and the idea is that later I'll copy it all again to paste it where it needs to be. In this second case you need to locate where daz actually stores installed files. The downloader keeps a copy of the img files if you don't tell it to delete after installation, but all the extracted content will show up somewhere else.
When I was moving everything, I found that daz was trying to find files from 3 different areas. "I have all content related to daz including "My DAZ 3D Library" and "Studio" folders in C:\Users\[usr_name]\Documents\DAZ 3D. " to be honest I couldn't figure out what this file was for? I could delete it and everything and daz acted like normal, it could still find all the installed files. I think I had to crawl deep into the DIM (the installer) settings to see where it was sending everything, and I think it was hidden somewhere else on teh c drive, maybe like the app data folder, not sure but that is the file that maters. Then there is another folder (I think it is in the decuments library), but it contains files that help daz remember what you have installed. if you delete these or forget to copy them over, daz just will not recognize when you have downloaded content. Again, trying to find the file location randomly or with daz prefernce settings was nearly impossible, but the DIM was simpler and cleaner to look at and offered clues on where it puts files, I think the DIM actually is what updates the file that instructs daz what is installed (at least for smart content). to keep everything clean, I had daz only look for content from one folder (where everything was installed, instead of looking for 3 bs locations), I moved the daz program itself and all related files into one folder, so that files are not scattered to all different parts of my OS hard drive, this way I can unplug the archiving drive and plug it into another computer, and everything is there. It was a lot of work and black magic so I'm sorry I can't too detailed about what to look for, only that looking at the DIM settings was the key to my success.
