I'm coming from version 12 to 13.21. During the upgrade DO did not offer me the option of selecting what directory I wanted to install the program into. Is it no longer possible to select a custom directory by command line in a silent install or whether a user wants DO as the default file manager or FTP client? (I like to keep my apps out of the Windows C:\Program Files folder in case the OS gets hosed and I have to reinstall; it also make OS imaging and backup files much smaller if I have my apps on a separate logical drive).
AFAIK how it works has not changed since later versions of Opus 12.
If you're installing over an existing version, it won't usually let you change the path from what it already is.
You'd need to reinstall Opus in that situation anyway.
As Leo said, this will not prevent you from having to reinstall. This is true for Directory Opus but also for almost any other software, unless it specifically declares itself as being "portable".
When a software application is installing itself, it will put files in "the installation directory", which by default is "Program Files" as a conveniency to find all your installed application in one place, but it might also put files elsewhere in the system (user AppData folder and its subfolders, Local/Roaming, being the most used locations) and maybe even more importantly it will also put records in the registry (to store internal data, to register file extensions, etc ...).
If you do a clean Windows install, none of these entries will be present in the registry, and non portable applications will either simply not work, or behave very erratically.
Thanks for both of your replies. But I did want to clarify something so that other users are not confused. I image my Windows and Linux operating system partitions regularly (twice a week) but I keep all of my programs and data on a separate partition (also imaged; but far less frequently) because my experience has been that 3rd party programs rarely blow up your PC; it's mostly errant drivers, malware or registry screw ups inside the operating system that do the damage. And when Windows blows up you don't want your data and apps lost with it. So by re-imaging my drive to a clean Windows state, I restore all programs to working order even if they write data to the Windows "AppData" or "Program Files" directories. The only way I could loose an app would be if Windows blew before I could make an image backup. And even then, it would just be that one app. I use this arrangement mostly to avoid having to back up huge programs like Microsoft Office and Adobe products because my operating system image is only about 15GB (in a compressed image) and takes less than two minutes to restore if something goes wrong, whereas if I were install all that stuff in Program Files it would be well over 500GB and take much more time.