Starise
The best part of the setup Waves has is this: Imagine your computer dies. Have your licenses on a usb drive? No problem. Download the shell on another computer, plug in the usb drive and you're good to go.
The alternative is to hunt down every single company you bought plugs from, attempt to remember the login info you set up like 5 years ago. Get the serial numbers or the auth file or whatever for each and every plugin you own. Ouch.
Now off with ya...enough of this clownery :)
Not sure this is true. On my Waves Central, you can only have the licenses in one place--either on your local computer on the "Waves Cloud"...not both. When I got a new computer, and reinstalled Waves, I couldn't authorize them because the licenses were still "installed" on the old computer. I had to drag the old computer out of storage, fire it up, "unauthorize the licenses" to transfer them to the Waves cloud, and only then could I download them to the new PC.
I also had a problem when a new version of Waves Central suddenly invalidated all of the "local" license on my new computer. I had to use the "once a year re-authorize licenses" option to get the licenses. I sure as hell hope this doesn't happen again, because I really don't want to have to get into a fight with the Waves people to get lost licenses back.