Everyone's setup is different, but there are some things you can do to optimize performance. Refer to the Performance Tuning guide for details.

RomVault initially decompresses and hashes all files in archives the first time an archive is scanned if you are using the default scanning method. This process takes time up front, but subsequent scans will be very fast. Archives are only rescanned if the archive modified time has changed. There are ways to scan only headers, but this is not recommended. Refer to the UI Overview and Scanning / Fixing Levels pages for more details.

Yes. Upgrade to the latest version of RomVault. Prior to version 3.6.0, V5 CHDs were decompressed and verified using chdman.exe, which is simply slow. RomVault 3.6.0 introduced CHD verification natively without relying on a separate application. This enhancement also included multi-threaded scanning to increase the verification speed by 3-4x compared to chdman.exe.

RomVault 3.6.0 changed the way CHDs are scanned and removed a dependency on chdman.exe for full verification. If you never used chdman.exe for full verification, then a regular scan will now fully decompress and hash the contents of your CHDs. To only check the headers without any verification, then you can perform a “Headers Only” scan from the right-click context menu in the tree panel.

It depends. The DATRoot is meant to provide an outline for how you organize your ROMs, however you can use Directory Rules to map DAT directories to ROM directories. RomVault stores references to ROMs based on how you have your DATRoot oganized. This means you can change the ROM Path in a directory rule to point to a new location and RomVault will transparently apply the update to the cache. Note this approach only works if the ROMs are moved to their new location and the modified timestamps did not change.

A word of caution: RomVault's directory rules are powerful, but can become difficult to manage if you have dozens of them. It's best to plan out how you want to organize your ROMs and align your DATRoot accordingly as close as possible. This will allow you to simplify your directory rules. For more information refer to the Organizing Your DATs page and Directory Rules page to learn about the options available and how rules cascade.

Under most circumstances, the best approach is to simply move your DATs around to match the way you want your ROMs organized. If the files are already scanned, RomVault will move the files in the most performant way possible using raw copy and ZipMove actions. See the Scanning and Fixing Levels page for additional information about when these actions are used during a fix.

Only directories with a DAT will display in the tree. If your preferred organization setup requires ignoring a directory in your RomRoot, then you can use a placeholder DAT to make that directory appear in the tree which you can deselect or lock. The placeholder DAT only needs to contain this: <?xml version=“1.0”?><datafile/>

Refer to the wiki page about Archive Types.

If you can't find the answer you are looking for here, please join us on Discord and ask one of our community members for help.

Do not ask for ROMs on the RomVault discord. There are plenty of public places to find ROMs, just search for them. Archive.org is a good place to start.