If My PC Dies (SOLVED)

I'm having problems with my PC and am afraid It may need to be replaced. If this happens how do I reinstate Sonar Platinum, Melodyne Editor, and Addictive Drums on the new PC? What will I lose?

Thanks SuperG! Doing that now. From what I've read so far it sounds like a RAM problem. I replaced my RAM chips last year so I will check that out in the morning.

Exactly what I was thinking. This PC is over 6 years old and is a Dell as you can see. I'll check my RAM and then take it to a local PC repair shop down the street. I'm having fan problems and the blue screen of death popping up in the last 2 weeks. I haven't added any programs though or changed anything except the Sonar upgrade/renewal 

I'm also checking  Dell XPS 890 out  

Once thing I would do is take note of your drive partitioning information and drive letters of all drives - you will want these replicated on your new machine - especially if you decide to change the whole lot to a brand new machine. 
 
I have a drive I installed for Sonar projects and content but it's not external. It takes all day to back up 

I'm watching the cost of repair and if it's too high I'm replacing my PC. It's over 6 years old. Checking RAM 1st!
 

promidi
If you do a full complete backup of your entire hard drive(s) (including OS) to a separate external drive using a proper backup program, you should not lose anything.

This is something you should be doing on a production machine anyway on a daily basis.  I do the OS backup once a week and a work files and settings backup nightly using a scheduled backup solution to an external drive.

If your repair shop just changes the motherboard/cpu and ram, the data on your existing hard drive(s) should remain intact.  Once you have reinstalled your OS to how it was before, then you can restore your user data from backup

Once thing I would do is take note of your drive partitioning information and drive letters of all drives - you will want these replicated on your new machine - especially if you decide to change the whole lot to a brand new machine.

that says it all - disk backup mandatory at regular intervals

You won't be able to copy the OS from one computer to another, because each PC's motherboard chips/devices are going to be different, and the drivers for one set of those won'r work for a different set you would get with anything but an exact match for motherboard and revision.  In addition, the programs would all have to be installed anew on the new load of the OS on a different machine as well.
 
Consequently, I never worry about backing up the OS, other than a single time for recovery to the same computer, should the primary hard drive fail, or some other need like that - corrupted Windows, ransom ware, etc...
 
I bought myself a 6 TB USB 3 external drive to back up all my non-OS data, such as projects and user documents/pictures/videos/etc.  What I do NOT do is keep backing up old static projects or user data.  It is all backed up once, and then I periodically backup new or altered projects and user data, that has changed or is new since the full backup.
 
Additionally, for ME, I already have an external drive that my Komplete 8 Ultimate samples all came on, so I don't bother backing those libraries up again.  I have another 1 TB in sample libraries from downloading the complete Composer Cloud collection, and I DO have those backed up once, but again do not need to keep backing those up as they are not only stable, I could always download them again.
 
So, with some thought and organization and consistency, you can (and I recommend you do), back up things that are new/changing, on an ongoing basis, without having to devote massive amounts of time to do so, and for user data that is static, you can do quite fine with a single external backup of those data.
 
Even with a brand new backup drive, it only has a 3 year warranty, and some only have a 1 year warranty, so keep that in mind - investing in a new backup drive for less than $200 every couple of years is well worth it to ME, just to be safe, which is the whole point.  That is FAR less money than it would take to somehow try to recreate projects - particularly those with audio tracks.
 
Internal hard drives also have dwindling life expectancy anymore.  Seagate used to offer 5-year warranties, and now often only offer a 1-year.  Western Digital has some that are 3-year and some that are 5-year, and refurbished drives typically have only a 90-day warranty.  I had a couple of SSD's crap out in less than 6 months, though that was a couple years back, but I still am not sure of their longevity, so I backup backup backup.
 
Bob Bone