Setup & user guide

Requirements

• Operating system — Windows 10 & 11 (64-bit).
• Browser — a current Chrome, Edge or Firefox. Chrome or Edge is recommended so 3D PrintVault can open in its own app window with no tabs or address bar.
• Graphics — any GPU that runs a slicer. 3D thumbnails are rendered through the browser.
• Disk — space for a thumbnail cache. Budget a few hundred megabytes for a library of several thousand models.

3D PrintVault does not need an internet connection, an account, or administrator rights to run.

Installing

1. Download the installer using the link in your purchase email.
2. Run it. If Windows shows a SmartScreen warning because the application is new, choose More info → Run anyway.
3. Follow the prompts. A desktop shortcut is created for you.
4. Launch 3D PrintVault from the shortcut.

First run

The first time you launch 3D PrintVault it will ask where things live. You can change any of this later.

• Library root — the folder 3D PrintVault will organize. It creates one subfolder per category here, plus an _inbox for new arrivals. Point it at an empty folder if you're starting fresh, or at your existing model folder to adopt it in place.
• Sweep sources — the folders to look in when you press Sweep. Your Downloads folder is the obvious one; add any old drive or staging folder you want emptied.
• Sealed folders — folders 3D PrintVault must never write to. Read the section below before skipping this.

Once configured, press Rescan Library. The first pass indexes every model and starts rendering thumbnails in the background. On a large library this takes a few minutes — leave it running. Subsequent launches are instant because the renders are cached.

Configuration

All settings live in a single config.json file in the 3D PrintVault program folder. You can edit it in any text editor while the app is closed. The keys worth knowing:

Use forward slashes in paths — D:/3D PrintVault/library — and restart 3D PrintVault after editing.

Sealed folders

This is the most important setting in the application, and the one to get right before your first sweep.

A sealed folder is one 3D PrintVault indexes but is structurally incapable of writing to. Use it for anything you cannot afford to have moved:

• Designs you sell, or work you've done for a client
• Models you paid for, where the license terms matter
• Any folder with a structure something else depends on

Inside a sealed folder 3D PrintVault will still render thumbnails, run searches, count prints and open files in your CAD tool. It simply cannot move, rename or reorganize anything there, in either direction. Every model from a sealed folder shows a lock badge on its card.

The airlock

If you do want a controlled route between your library and a sealed folder, set commercial_airlock to a folder name. That one subfolder becomes the only permitted crossing point: models you drag out of the library land there, and files may only travel back out of the sealed root if they are already inside it. Everything else stays sealed.

Your first sweep

1. Open 🧹 Sweep Downloads in the sidebar.
2. Press the sweep button. 3D PrintVault reads your configured sources and builds a plan. Nothing has moved yet.
3. Read the plan. Each row shows the item, whether it's a loose file, a folder or an archive, and the category it's headed for.
4. Untick anything you don't want brought in, and change any destination you disagree with.
5. Press Apply. Files are moved into the Inbox, archives are unpacked into project folders, and names are normalized.

What happens to your archives: a zip containing a single folder is flattened so you don't end up with bracket/bracket/files. A zip containing loose parts becomes a project folder named after the archive. The original zip is moved to an archive directory, never destroyed.

Sweep only ever runs when you press the button. There is no watcher and no scheduled task.

Filing & printing

Swept items land in the Inbox — already unpacked, renamed and thumbnailed, but not yet categorized. To file something, drag its card onto a category in the sidebar. Multi-file projects move as one unit; they cannot be split.

Day-to-day use:

• Search from the top bar across names, projects and tags. Sort by most printed, name, recently added or largest.
• Click a card to open its detail view, including the 3D viewer for STL, OBJ and 3MF.
• Right-click a card to open it in Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer, Plasticity, Shapr3D, Fusion 360, FreeCAD, Rhino, Blender, Illustrator or Inkscape — only the ones you actually have installed are offered.
• Tap the print counter each time you print something. Counts are keyed to the file's content hash, so they survive renames, moves and re-downloads.
• Queue, filament and stats are in the sidebar and work how you'd expect.

Repair, duplicates & quarantine

Repair & Regroup

Finds files that clearly belong to the same project but have ended up in different folders, and proposes reunited project folders. Each suggestion is shown individually with the files it would gather, and you approve or reject one at a time. Nothing regroups itself.

Duplicates

Compares models by content rather than filename, so the same part downloaded twice under two names is still caught. Results are grouped with every copy's location and the space you'd reclaim.

Quarantine

3D PrintVault has no delete operation. Junk files, byte-identical duplicates and stray installers are moved to a quarantine folder, batched by date. Nothing leaves your disk. Review that folder in Explorer whenever you like and empty it yourself — deleting is a decision only you can make.

Undoing things

Every move, rename and regroup is written to a journal before it happens, grouped into batches. Open ⏱ Activity / Undo to see the log.

Each batch has a one-click Undo that returns every file in it to its original path. This works on any batch in the log, not just the most recent — a sweep that relocated six hundred files is one click to reverse, an hour or a week later.

Backups

3D PrintVault stores its own data in two places next to your library:

• printvault.db — a single SQLite file holding print counts, tags, queue, spools and the operation journal.
• thumbnails/ — the rendered preview cache. Safe to lose; it regenerates.

Back up printvault.db along with your model folders and you've backed up everything 3D PrintVault knows. Your models themselves are ordinary files in ordinary folders — any backup tool handles them, and they remain fully usable without 3D PrintVault installed.

Troubleshooting

Changes I made aren't showing up

Close 3D PrintVault completely and relaunch it from the shortcut. If the window is still showing old content, check Task Manager for more than one 3D PrintVault process — an older instance holding the port will keep serving stale content. End any extras and relaunch.

Thumbnails aren't appearing

Rendering happens in the background and reports progress in the top bar. On a large library the first pass takes a few minutes. If a specific model never renders, it's likely a malformed or unsupported variant of the format — it stays in your library and stays searchable, it just keeps a type badge instead of a render.

The window won't open, or the page won't load

Something else may be using 3D PrintVault's port. Change port in config.json to another value (for example 8790) and relaunch.

A model won't open in my slicer

3D PrintVault hands the file to the application you chose. If the application isn't installed where 3D PrintVault expects, add or correct its path in the open_with section of config.json.

Windows or my antivirus flagged it

New applications from small publishers sometimes trigger a reputation warning. Choose to keep and run it. If a specific antivirus product blocks it, tell us which one so we can submit it for review.

Something moved that shouldn't have

Open Activity / Undo and reverse the batch. Then add the folder in question to commercial_roots so it's sealed from then on.

Uninstalling

Uninstall 3D PrintVault from Windows Settings → Apps like any other program.

Your models are untouched: a normal folder tree of normally named files that any program can open. The database and thumbnail cache are left in place — delete them if you want the space, or keep them and your print counts and history will still be there if you reinstall.

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Still stuck? Email us with what you did, what you expected and what happened instead, plus your Windows version and roughly how big your library is. We answer every message.