One of my goals this week is to finally get BIAB upgraded from 2018 to 2019. Right now I have everything installed on my computer's hard drive, but I think I would like to run it from the external hard drive it comes on instead. Should I just uninstall 2018 and then reinstall 2019 to run from the external? Also are there any disadvantages to running off the external hard drive?
If you have the space on your hard drive, it will run a little peppier from there than from an external USB drive. This isn't just BIAB; it would be true of any program because of the throughput speeds.
If you do decide to run from the USB drive, it should be fine. Select that in the install options. You don't actually have to do anything to the installation on your computer, but if you do decide to delete it, copy off any custom styles, songs you wrote, and bonus pak installers first.
I can run BiaB from the external hard drive with no issues.
Do you have any special add-on paks that are currently installed on the computer's internal drive? If so, these might not be included in the upgrade and need to be copied across to the external drive.
Generally, there is no requirement to uninstall your existing version first.
Many people install the main program to the computer's internal drive but leave the RealTracks and RealDrums on the external drive. There is a setting under Options>Preferences that allows you to specify the location of these tracks.
I do have some of the Xtra packs. I will have to look into moving those if I go this rout. I have a 2G hard drive. I think it's a little over half full. I still got some space. Maybe I could just move some of my old project files to an external hard drive to save space.
Just to be safe, I copied the entire BIAB folder to my external drive and then installed 2019 upgrade to that drive. Now I'm sure I didn't lose anything in the process.
True. But I think you must still run the installer for 2019 and select the minimal install, as well as specify where the rest of the files are. There is the activation scheme that puts a few files on your computer boot drive, and a few other small files like fonts get written there. Also, 2019 now has the new plug-in and this and related entries get written to your boot drive.