Software authorizations/registrations in general
 

Hi, I am just about to 'upgrade' myself from Carbon Copy to SuperDuper! and have a question (I hope I did not miss this if answered elsewhere). Of note, I have never had to restore from my CCC DMG clone (lucky me right !) so I have no real feel for the following situation in practice.

I use a lot of audio/music software that rely on various means of registration/piracy protection schemes. Are there any known issues if, in the event I had to restore or boot from the clone drive (or restore from image)? In other words, will whatever is authorizing my software remain intact and enabled to the best of your knowledge in all cases (either a bootable clone disk or DMG restore provided all other hardware stays the same (assuming a replaced source hard disk)? All questions assume clone made to a Lacie FW hardrive. Also please note if partitioned drive schemes for clone destination would change your answer.

Some example companies

-Native Instruments (Komplete 2)
-Ableton (Live 5)
-Arturia (plug-ins)
-Adobe CS2 (now an enable by activation scheme)
-DSP Quattro

and manyother varioius programs and AU/VST plug-ins (which I can provide upon request).

One other question, it has been noted in the FAQ that an image can be updated by manually creating it first with disk utility. Is the required extra disk space for the creation of the clone created by SuperDuper! (noted to be around twice of source disc size) need to be simply on the same disk as the image since your instruction is to make the image itself the size of the source? Just want to be clear. Thanks in advance.

OS 10.3.8 / PB 17" / 1 Ghz / 1 Gb RAM

You know, Loopy C, that's one of those questions that's really hard to answer. Certainly we're going to work as well as CCC does in this kind of situation.

The fact is, the nature of these copy protection methods is that they want to prevent copying. Even legitimate "backups". So, they squirrel things away on the drive in abnormal places, like the drive's sector 0 -- places where you can't really copy without going down to a very low level (and, even then, games are played).

So -- in the end, it depends entirely on the way the software is protected. But if they're playing "nasty games", the activations will not be preserved -- although it's possible that the reactivation will be allowed, depending on how the software checks. (In other words, if they look at the machine more closely to see how much has changed, they might allow a reactivation because the hardware, apart from the drive, is the same.)

Might. To be sure, you'll have to contact the vendor.

Regarding the disk images -- if you use a sparse image as described in the FAQ, you need not have 2x the space, because we don't do a conversion. While there's some overhead in a sparse image, it's nothing like the space taken, temporarily, during Sparse -> DMG conversion.

Hope that helps.

Thank you for the reply Dave! I think a few people over at OSXAudio had reported successful transfers but as you point out, each manufacturer has their own angle on how to protect themselves (rightly so), so I will at least be prepared if in the worst case scenario some don't. :cool:

Definitely. I'd really call each company you're concerned about and ask then exactly how they expect you to handle catastrophic disk failure, and what their policy is.