How to save and use SD folder to external storage?

[mylife4aiur5]

I have 500gb of models which is taking a lot of space in my computer and I dont think I can add them anymore. Tho I have 1TB of storage, I have to use most of them for something else.

The main issue is that Stable Diffusion folder is located within my computer's storage. Moving them might cause the problem with the terminal but I wonder if I can save and load SD folder to external storage so that I dont need to worry about the computer's storage size.

Any idea?

[vladmandic]

either use cmdline flag --ckpt-dir
or leave folder as is, but link it to somewhere else (on windows use junction points and on linux simple symlinks)

[ljleb]

I don't recommend using junctions on windows as it introduces local changes that can prevent git from pulling code from the remote. using a cli flag is much easier to work with

[vladmandic]

I don't recommend using junctions on windows as it introduces local changes that can prevent git from pulling code from the remote. using a cli flag is much easier to work with

in general, yes, but /models/**/* is in .gitignore so /models/Stable-diffusion is safe to link

[ljleb]

That is correct. Creating a junction for all subdirs of /models is not very practical IMO, but if you're okay with keeping the dir up to date when new categories are created then I don't see the problem.

[CurtisDS]

Here are all the command arguments that you can add to your webui-user.bat file
--ckpt-dir "D:\\my models\\checkpoints"
--hypernetwork-dir "D:\\my models\\hypernetworks"
--embeddings-dir "D:\\my models\\embeddings"
--lora-dir "D:\\my models\\lora"

If you wanted to use all the settings at once your COMMANDLINE_ARGS line would look something like this:

set COMMANDLINE_ARGS=--xformers  --ckpt-dir "D:\\my models\\checkpoints" --hypernetwork-dir "D:\\my models\\hypernetworks" --embeddings-dir "D:\\my models\\embeddings" --lora-dir "D:\\my models\\lora"

[CurtisDS]

is it trying to load a previously set VAE? When you remove the VAE path and load a1111 does it load with a VAE selected in the VAE dropdown? If it does make sure to set it to blank before adding the --vae-path to the arguments

[ShaguarWKL]

is it trying to load a previously set VAE? When you remove the VAE path and load a1111 does it load with a VAE selected in the VAE dropdown? If it does make sure to set it to blank before adding the --vae-path to the arguments

Set VAE in UI to None. Restarted in console to double check no VAE set. Added --vae-path back. Restarted but still same issue.

   Directory: C:\Users\warre\Downloads\AI\Models

Mode LastWriteTime Length Name

---

d---- 4/2/2023 23:15  Embedding
d---- 4/2/2023 23:08  Hypernetwork
d---- 5/2/2023 12:40  LORA
d---- 4/2/2023 23:36  Stable Diffusion
d---- 4/2/2023 23:20  VAE
d---- 4/1/2023 23:20  VAE-approx

Loading weights [bc561295ca] from C:/Users/warre/Downloads/AI/Models\Stable Diffusion\Protogen_Infinity-X8.6.safetensors
Creating model from config: C:\Users\warre\Downloads\AI\WebUI - Automatic1111\configs\v1-inference.yaml
LatentDiffusion: Running in eps-prediction mode
DiffusionWrapper has 859.52 M params.
loading stable diffusion model: AssertionError
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\warre\Downloads\AI\WebUI - Automatic1111\webui.py", line 111, in initialize
modules.sd_models.load_model()
File "C:\Users\warre\Downloads\AI\WebUI - Automatic1111\modules\sd_models.py", line 406, in load_model
load_model_weights(sd_model, checkpoint_info, state_dict, timer)
File "C:\Users\warre\Downloads\AI\WebUI - Automatic1111\modules\sd_models.py", line 299, in load_model_weights
sd_vae.load_vae(model, vae_file, vae_source)
File "C:\Users\warre\Downloads\AI\WebUI - Automatic1111\modules\sd_vae.py", line 141, in load_vae
assert os.path.isfile(vae_file), f"VAE {vae_source} doesn't exist: {vae_file}"
AssertionError: VAE from commandline argument doesn't exist: C:/Users/warre/Downloads/AI/Models/VAE

[ShaguarWKL]

@CurtisDS Found the issue. On https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/wiki/Command-Line-Arguments-and-Settings, it must be a typo stating --vae-path. Just for the heck of it, since this was the only oddity. I tried --vae-dir and it loaded up.

Loading VAE weights specified in settings: C:\Users\warre\Downloads\AI\Models\VAE\vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned.safetensors
Applying xformers cross attention optimization.

[CurtisDS]

weird. You get an error if you use an argument that isnt recognized (at least on the latest version). Things change so frequently though... so I could see them having it as -path and changing it to -dir to match the other arguments and then not updating it everywhere.

Im glad you got it working

[CurtisDS]

looking at it again --vae-path seems to be a setting used to override the VAE that it will use. Its meant to be a path to a specific VAE. The wiki is just missing the --vae-dir argument entirely. The wording for the description of the --vae-path argument is also not very good. It's clearer what it's used for in the source code.

https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/blob/master/modules/shared.py#L32

vs

https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/blob/master/modules/shared.py#L93