After about 2 weeks, I find that blender has offloaded or deleted itself, through no obvious action that I saw, and definitely not an action I took. As it was pinned to my task bar, I didn’t think anything of it, until I tried to import 3d model from blender to unity - and the error code said my blender was out of date. Went to windows start menu to check what version blender I have - and blender was no longer in the menu and didn’t appear in search. Yet I had it, as evidenced by the taskbar pin.
Others in my course have experienced the same thing, and the tutors have said it is an ongoing issue - every 2 weeks or so blender seems to be offloaded, deleted, or deletes itself. Can anyone help explain this phenomenon and or what they hell is causing to this to happen and possibly how to avoid?
Disclaimer:
I’m not a dev and this just a guess on my part,
saying that, when I was doing my own studies in IT, the IT department at the campus kept restoring the Campus computers from a master image frequently, probably as a defense against viruses and the wired stuff student did to the machines (including installation of illegal software).
Anyway, if something is not in the master Image, it just goes away(overwritten). The only solution is to put anything that you want to survive the re imaging processes, somewhere on your profile folder (document folder or desktop) since usually they are stored on a different location or the re imaging is done in a way to avoid overwriting user data …
So instead of using the installer version of blender, use a portable version and extract it to the desktop or to your document folder…
Maybe you can ask the IT department to add Blender To the master Image. Unlikely to happen quickly and even if they did add it, most likely they will add the LTS release not the latest Version …
Thank you @LazyDodo and @myway880 for the replies. I agree this behaviour is unusual. And I have administrator rights to the laptop so am able to access my own downloads of software and manage updates. Would a master image still interfere with the program in this case?
In readme.html, the download for windows is supposed to be a .zip. But it is actually a .msi - which is an image (?) and possibly why it might function strangely? I am keeping the file in case, but I may experiment with deleting it to see if any affect - although I know it’s unlikely.
The .msi does install the appropriate folder C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 3.0 - and it contains presumably all that it would if it was a.zip, mostly visible in the screenshot below.
So it is a head-scratcher. I have downloaded it again for a second time in the same month and I will post if it happens again!
We offer both .zip versions and .msi installers (as well as steam and windows store versions that actually do auto update, but that’s the respective stores doing the updates not blender itself) when you download of the blender.org site the msi is the default for windows, but by clicking the other versions link you can get the .zip version as well. They are generated from the same blender build and are mostly identical main difference is the msi will register the .blend extension for you so you double click a .blend file it opens with blender, while for the .zip version you have to manually register this in the user prefs panel.
Program Files directory is always overwritten by re imaging software since most software problems happen there, so blender needs to be on your user directory … (my document and the desktop) are an example of this.
Just download the zipped version and extract it to your desktop. Or copy the blender 3.0 folder from program files directory to your desktop. It should work the same, blender is quite portable…
Although since this seem to be your personal laptop, the issue could be something else. I’m not sure.
Sorry about that…
