External Settings (Lite Edition or Higher)
basehead allows storing your settings, licenses, presets, databases and backups on external drives. This makes it easier to use the same configuration across computers at different locations you work on.
Note: Before turning on ‘Use External Settings’ you need to ‘Clone’ them and once and once engaged, you will see the Settings locations changed and combined into one path on an external drive as shown below.
Key Features:
– Store settings on removable drives or external storage
– Automatic detection of external settings when drives are connected
– Safe handling of drive disconnection
– Easy migration tool to ‘Clone’ your current settings
How to Use:
1. Go to Options/General and find the “Use External Settings” toggle switch
2. To set up for the first time:
– Connect your external drive and
– Select a destination drive (system drives and cloud storage are not supported)
– Click the “Clone” button and wait for the cloning process to complete
– Choose whether to switch to the external settings immediately
Important Notes:
– Switching between local and external settings requires a restart of basehead
– Your settings are stored in a folder named “basehead.settings” on the external drive
– The default ‘Transfers’ folder is excluded when cloning settings as that is independent
– If an external drive is disconnected at launch, basehead automatically falls back to local settings
– a file flag named EXT.settings is written to the local (AppData/Application Data) .settings folders and this used to trigger looking for external settings after you Clone your settings.
Safety Features:
– Cloning to System drives are prevented to use for ‘Cloning’ as that is a bit pointless…hehe
– Cloud storage drives (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.) should not be used
– External Settings integrity is verified before use
Best Practices:
– Use dedicated external drives rather than network locations
– Keep your external drive connected while using basehead
– you can also use the ‘Clone’ feature to periodically create a backup
NOTE: This feature can be used even if basehead is not installed and launched from an external drive making it semi-portable, but to use some DAW integrations or basehead Connect you’ll need to run the Full Installer still.