Texture files not found when saving copying file to different drive

Support Materials and Textures
1

This trips me up everytime and i don’t really understand how to avoid it. Basically i have a backup folder on another drive and when i made progress i synchronize the directories with free file sinc.
I usually have no problems, but sometimes i accidentally do something in a file and didn’t realize. So i tried opening the version on the backup and it doesn’t find the textures, da. Since there is a ton, because i used tree assets i don’t want to search for each bloody folder by hand. Also i only found the console to check which are missing. How can i set it up, so blender uses absolute filepaths by default or any other way to make that simpler ?

2

Yes, you can set absolute file paths, see your preferences:
Opening & Saving - Blender 4.2 Manual
But I would advice against it.

As you may know, Blender looks at ‘remote’ files (e.g. textures) starting from the blend file location, and tries to keep data linked as relative paths as much as possible.

The best way to do this is to create a project folder that contains not just your blendfiles, but also the subfolders for images, renders etc.
That way a project can easily be moved around as it is all contained in one rootfolder. Blender just needs to look for stuff inside that ‘container’ folder.

And if you have assets, look into the asset manager and how to set up proper asset libraries on disk. This will also solve some issues you’re having now texture wise.

And if all fails: Replace File Path - Blender Market

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3

Also:

File → External Data → Find Missing Files

and then choose a directory to start…

4

İf you wish you can pack textures to file at File-external data-automaticly pack

5

That might be a not so good idea…

Packing will include every texture… every time if not unpacked and the automatic packing feature disabled… so when simply saving the blend file after unpack they get packed again…

But as i understood this the backup is already syncronized… best structure is indeed:

 .../projectname/projectfile.blend
 .../projectname/projectfile.blend1
 .../projectname/images/texture1.png
 .../projectname/images/texture2.png

keeping the files relative and syncing the complete projectname-folder.

6

Ok, thanks guys ! This gives me a few options. I think i will go with copying the textures into the project and syncing that folder. That addon looks good too !

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