[dnanian]

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.