External Hard Drive?

[rthomas268]

Hi,
Can an external hard drive or flash drive be used to store *.plans? I realize that the program and all the updates, bonus libraries, etc that the software relies on need to be on the same drive and probably on the same drive as the O/S. I might want to break down my house into individual rooms as I start to do some Interior Design work and expect that I will have to redraw each room and create a separate *.plan for it.

[Katalyst777]

Can an external hard drive or flash drive be used to store *.plans?

Sounds like a good way to back up your information, but you shouldn't save directly to, or work directly on plans from the external drive, due to it being so much slower to access and write information (like the software's regular auto-save files).

Not to mention, actively working on any type of file over a removable device like a flash drive, external drive, network etc is unreliable and a sure-fire way to end up with file corruption or even completely losing all of your hard work.

I even think that Home Designer support has stated that, for those very reasons, that working on plans or layouts over an external drive isn't even supported, so when something does go wrong, there isn't really anything they can do to help.

Stick with saving your plans onto the local machine and only use your external drive for backup purposes.

You may want to Contact Home Designer technical support directly to confirm this and see if they have any additional suggestions.

I might want to break down my house into individual rooms as I start to do some Interior Design work and expect that I will have to redraw each room and create a separate *.plan for it.

Drawing each room independently in its own plan file, while I guess you could do it, don't really see the point in doing so. I don't really think that you need to worry about your file size getting too big and it always make more sense to see a room's location in context to the rest of the house.