Symlinking question re: Patch Days

[falsfire3401]

I've done symlinking before, but since space isn't an issue for me I ended up reverting to three wholly separate wow directories before the patch hit.

Now I'm looking at a really great deal on a 32GB SSD drive...since 32GB isn't enough to store 3 full copies of WOW I'm naturally thinking I'll symlink the data folders...have 3 wow's on the drive but only one "instance" of the data folder that the other two symlink to.

So how does that work come patch day? Do I run the "host" wow, let it update, then just copy one or two other files (not in the data folder) to the slave wow folders?

Yes, I need three separate wow folders, as I run different addons, different configs, etc between clients. I know with innerspace you can virtualize the config file, but I don't wanna go Innerspace just for that - I'm happy with my HotKeyNet solution I'm currently using.

[Sajuuk]

That should work just fine.

[falsfire3401]

Great! What are the other files (from outside the data folder) that you need to copy after a patch?

[falsfire3401]

That should work just fine.

Quoting your sig, Sajuuk...how do you fit the OS *AND* wow on a 30gb SSD? I run Win7 but I thought it would be bigger than a 30gb SSD all by itself?

[Ualaa]

The wow.exe will need to be copied.

[ollee]

...since 32GB isn't enough to store 3 full copies of WOW I'm naturally thinking I'll symlink the data folders..

You do know you only need to have 1 installation of wow right?? It splits out the account folders and what not?

Just pointing out...

<3
Ollee

[Sajuuk]

Quoting your sig, Sajuuk...how do you fit the OS *AND* wow on a 30gb SSD? I run Win7 but I thought it would be bigger than a 30gb SSD all by itself?
I must have read it wrong - as it stands now I don't have enough space for the both of them.

Edit- turns out I had the paging file on my SSD, I moved it to another drive, and I now have 17.1 Gb of space left!


Oh well, it's not like I play wow that much now. Signature corrected. SSDs ARE nice, and since it wasn't being used I installed windows 7 on it.

As it stands right now without the paging file and a relatively fresh installation of W7 I have 17.1Gb of space left - plenty for wow.

[falsfire3401]

Thanks for the replies.

The SSD is bought. $145cdn for a Corsair Extreme 32GB SSD (from ncix.com). Should have it within 1-2 days, they're notoriously FAST at shipping if orders are placed before 1pm PDT.

http://www.corsair.com/products/ssd_extreme/default.aspx


Plan to put 3x wow folders on it, with only one data folder Sym-linked. That should be less than 20gb total, leaving plenty of room for my windows-7 pagefile.


I know you said you can run one wow installation and launch three instances, but I don't want to do that because my three different instances of wow run at different resolutions, even different aspect ratios, and have different graphics quality and sound settings.

Main runs at 1920x1080 windowed, maximized, full graphics except shadows at minimum
Slaves run at 800x600 windowed, not maximized, absolute minimum graphics, capped at 20fps, and all sounds/music off.

Without running ISBoxer and virtualizing the config files I don't know of a way to do that on one wow install.

[Sajuuk]

I moved my page file around and my install of windows 7 pro RTM is only about 17.1Gb, more than enough room to house the data folder of wow.

My previous post has been edited to reflect this.

[falsfire3401]

I moved my page file around and my install of windows 7 pro RTM is only about 17.1Gb, more than enough room to house the data folder of wow.

My previous post has been edited to reflect this.

Hmm...maybe when I receive my pre-ordered Win7 in October and have to reinstall anyways I'll put Windows and the wow-data folder on the SSD. Pagefile on SSD isn't a huge priority, but wow data folder is...