railguy, on 19 December 2023 - 05:39 PM, said:
So have I except I've migrated to the link variant called symbolic link. I had a reason at the time but I do not now recall what it was.
At present I have 11 mini-routes, 3 or 4 era specific mini-routes for each of 4 US geographical areas. I use them mostly to segregate rolling stock by era (e.g., wood boxcars and steam locomotives in the early era but not in the modern one). I also have a master directory for all installed routes and I use symbolic links from there into the mini-routes. This allows me to have multiple occurrences of a route covering more than one era. If I really need to add era specific differences in shapes and their textures I'll make a special copy of the route in the master library leaving renaming the directories I whose content I will alter and add new directories in the mini-route using the proper names. Copy what I want from the renamed folders into the ones and off to editing.
Similarly I do much the same w/ rolling stock, a master library, including a folder /as downloaded with subsequent editing concurring elsewhere. I tend to renaming folder names and having renamed key items first place many identical mesh files and their textures in one folder, throwing away the many original .wag files and convert them to use .inc files. This normal goes very quick and leaves me with a .wag file of 12 or 13 rows for empty and loaded respectfully. This folder will get whatever group name I can find, whether what is XM_SP_B-50-14 or XM_PRR_X29_321000-321999 (i.e. XM is AAR code for Box, Merchandise). These new folders are then symlinked into many mini-routes.
The use of the two libraries means any further editing occurs in one place and with the symlinks when the editing is done the distribution is automatic.
The problem is initially there isn't anything recorded about the symlinks to without more work they would all be lost if something happened to the disk. I have solved that problem with a simple .bat file and scheduled backups.