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Old 04-29-2005, 12:37 PM
swampy swampy is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2005
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Adobe CS2 and backing up

I have been trying to get help on the Adobe Forums regarding doing cloned backups of my hard drive that include the Adobe Creative Suite 2. Adobe has implemented a new activation procedure for the Macintosh CS2 programs that apparently identifies the HARD DRIVE (NOT the computer serial/id number) to which the applications have been installed at the time of activation and registration. Apparently there is also a provision to "deactivate" a CS2 installation as well. Kinda like authorizing/deauthorizing iTunes.

I haven't installed CS2 yet, but my concern is that in moving from Panther to Tiger, I know I will want to do a SuperDuper bootable clone of the new Tiger "archive and install" from my primary hard drive. (I will have a full Panther bootable clone on a different external drive.)

Adobe's licensing allows for two copies of CS2 to be installed (2 separate computers, but apparently not two separate drives), but they may not be used at the same time. Fine with me, but I anticipate working in both Tiger and Panter until I'm comfortable that Tiger is working okay and recognizing printers, fonts etc. I may have to delay to fully move to Tiger if certain tools and applications (Extensis Suitcase etc.) are not yet compliant with Tiger.

The only response I have received from the Adobe forums regarding this was a suggestion that I not clone the Adobe software, but instead deactivate the original installation delete it from the hard drive then reinstall it from CD. The problem with this is having to keep track of all the custom brushes, swatches, third party plug ins / filters, templates, presets, actions etc. that will need to be replaced for each application!!!

I'm not looking to circumvent copy protection or pirate copies of Adobe's software. I also know that there are going to be glitches, crashes and perhaps a desire to reformat or repartition my primary hard drive down the road, but even Apple strongly suggests that before installing a new OS or major software that you BACK UP EVERYTHING! Apple and third party developers offer tools to make this a fairly painless procedure.

And what if the hard drive crashes (unrecoverable) without me being able to deactivate the current copy of CS2??? I'm very uncomfortable with all this.

Anybody else anticipate problems down the road for backing up Adobe stuff?

swampy

Last edited by swampy; 04-29-2005 at 12:40 PM.
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