Installing Paratext 9 {search terms: PT online offline}

Question

It would be good to have a little more information on installing P9 Beta (and P9 when it’s released).

These are the questions I have so far:

1. Usually an offline installer is one that has every file you need to install the program, but with P9 this is not the case . Can someone explain why the offline installer cannot contain the resources?

2. If you install with the offline installer and then later use the online installer, do you get the resources through the second install?

3. What does the offline installer include that the online installer doesn’t have?

Answer 1

1. Resources are not included because the installer would be huge as it would essentially be a dump of all the DBL resources and Enhanced Resources. It would probably be several GB in size. It would also get quickly out-of-date as the DBL resources and ERs are constantly being updated.

2. DBL resources and ERs are not included with either install.

3. The offline installer includes the C++ Runtime installers and .Net installers needed to run Paratext. The online installer checks to see which ones are needed and downloads the ones that are missing from the machine. That is the only difference between the two.

Note that this is the same as how it worked in 8.0.

Comments

Thanks, that’s a helpful summary.

anon291708:

2. DBL resources and ERs are not included with either install.

This wasn’t quite the answer I was looking for – look back at my Q. 2. I’m asking whether the online installer will download those resources if it’s reinstalling over a previous install that was done with the offline installer.

I’ve only installed on three computers, including my own, and I think I only used the offline installer. So I was looking for the quickest way to get the resources on my computer so that I can copy them to the others.

Which also begs the question: can you say, to the nearest GB, how many GB of resources the online installer will download? GB are expensive enough here that I do large downloads at home; the office is on a tight budget, and it’s not uncommon for our provider to switch off our Internet before the end of the month because we’ve run out of data quota.

And can you give a rough indication of how many standard resources and how many enhanced resources it downloads? I don’t think installing P8 gave you any resources except for SLTs: the choice was left up to you as to what to download from the DBL. Are you saying that P9 assumes there are some SRs that everyone needs? Maybe there are ERs that some projects don’t need, and they could save quota by not having to download them.

Answer 2

Please note that you can copy resources from another computer: https://paratext.org/ufaqs/can-text-resources-be-installed-offline/

Answer 3

wdavidhj:

If you install with the offline installer and then later use the online installer, do you get the resources through the second install?

The online installer (or the offline installer) does NOT install or download any resources beyond the source language texts. If you want to install any of the around 1500 resources available through the DBL you must use the Download and install resources tool.

If you had a situation where it was difficult to access resources, you could download the resources to another machine and then copy the _resources folder from one computer to another. However, only the resources available to you based on your organization will be accessible.

If someone with access to all the resources downloaded all of the resources and copied that folder to another user, the second user would only see the resources to which their organization has access.

How much space would it take? Looking at the average zip (p8z) files for the resources that I’ve downloaded it looks like the average is around 1.5M. So to include the ~1500 available resources would add over 2G to the install file.

Answer 4

Note that in PT9, with the introduction of the Enhanced Resources, the ERs (which are around 5x the size of normal resources) also include images and maps (and will likely include other media in the future) adding another 1GB+ to the ~2GB that @anon848905 came up with.