[galaxy-dev] Bypassing Data Managers?

Dear all, I'm a bit new at being a Galaxy administrator, so apologies for the basic question. I need to install some bowtie and bowtie2 indices. I have the indices already but came across this page: https://wiki.galaxyproject.org/Admin/DataPreparation which says the steps mentioned on that page have been replaced with Data Managers. I'm having problems with installing Data Managers (accessing ToolShed right now and some errors which I guess I need to sort out later) and was wondering if there was a way to bypass Data Managers? Are Data Managers the only way of installing reference data? With the indices already pre-calculated, can I install them without having to go through re-calculating them within Galaxy? Thank you! Ray