Naevius Posted April 25, 2023 Share Posted April 25, 2023 (edited) Hi everyone, my LB setup is currently completely portable on external HDD, with LB exe file, emulators, media and games all located in the LB main folders (F:/ drive). Since I am buying a newer pc and wanted to speed up a little bit the loading time of all the stuff, I wanted to leave on external HDD only my games, moving all the rest (LB exe file, emulators and media) into a newer internal hard disk. I am little bit concerned about the correct procedure to do this without losing months of metadata editing (scraping names and games features from zero would be a nightmare) and "linkage" to my games: what I was thinking about was copying to the internal hard disk all my LB folder EXCLUDING the games folder. Since I will not change the path of my the games folder from my external HDD, I assume all the games will remain "linked" to my external HDD and I won't need to change games folders path or something like that in LB, provided that my external HDD will always be bound to F:/ letter. I also assume that media and emulators will work properly because they are all located in the LB main folder, which should be "portable" by definition. Hope I explained correctly and you could give me a hand in case my assumptions are wrong! Thanks in advance! Edited April 25, 2023 by Naevius Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skizzosjt Posted April 25, 2023 Share Posted April 25, 2023 hi @Naevius the assumption is not totally correct. what makes LB/BB portable is it uses relative paths whenever possible and contains basically everything in the LB folder. if you have everything on a single disk and use a relative path to your LB install Games folder, that is what makes it portable. if you plugged that disk into another system it just works as the saying goes, everything is mapped within that disk and the games folder path would look like ".\Games" and would be like this for an ex if on F drive "F:\LaunchBox\Games" If you move LB/BB to another drive letter like C then your games folder path would still be ".\Games" in LB but since on another drive letter it would be "C:\LaunchBox\Games" which is NOT where you want your games and therefor nothing would work. You would need to remap and it would use an absolute path instead. Absolute paths are required when directing to another drive letter. It would take like 5mins to go into your platforms and remap their Games folder. no big deal. the goal is achievable, but your assumption wasn't quite correct. hopefully that clears it up! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Naevius Posted April 25, 2023 Author Share Posted April 25, 2023 3 minutes ago, skizzosjt said: hi @Naevius the assumption is not totally correct. what makes LB/BB portable is it uses relative paths whenever possible and contains basically everything in the LB folder. if you have everything on a single disk and use a relative path to your LB install Games folder, that is what makes it portable. if you plugged that disk into another system it just works as the saying goes, everything is mapped within that disk and the games folder path would look like ".\Games" and would be like this for an ex if on F drive "F:\LaunchBox\Games" If you move LB/BB to another drive letter like C then your games folder path would still be ".\Games" in LB but since on another drive letter it would be "C:\LaunchBox\Games" which is NOT where you want your games and therefor nothing would work. You would need to remap and it would use an absolute path instead. Absolute paths are required when directing to another drive letter. It would take like 5mins to go into your platforms and remap their Games folder. no big deal. the goal is achievable, but your assumption wasn't quite correct. hopefully that clears it up! Sure it does, thanks. Can I expect after changing the Games folder all the games in LB maintain their metadata and linkage to images / videos etc. with no need to scrape them once again? Thanks once again 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skizzosjt Posted April 25, 2023 Share Posted April 25, 2023 1 minute ago, Naevius said: Sure it does, thanks. Can I expect after changing the Games folder all the games in LB maintain their metadata and linkage to images / videos etc. with no need to scrape them once again? Thanks once again yes no need to scrape again. the metadata is stored in another location and I don't think as a user there is an ability to remap that data's location. metadata is stored in \LaunchBox\Data and its subfolders. all those XML files is what contains the data that populates your library and has all the data like this game is made by this dev and you played it X times for X hours, various options and settings, etc. images and videos folders are capable to be remapped though. as long as those are currently and will still use a relative path then you can move it to and from any drive letter on any system, and these types of media such as all images and videos will continue to work. in other words, if those are working fine currently and you don't plan on moving those files locations within the LB folder structure (ie still in \LaunchBox\Images and \LaunchBox\Videos) then no further adjustments are required. this is the exact purpose and function of a portable program like LB Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Naevius Posted April 25, 2023 Author Share Posted April 25, 2023 Thanks a lot for your answers! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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