dan le has a very good question that I too would like an answer for. If anyone knows,
please speak up. What a incredible hassle to re-authorize everything.....ugh!

dan le
To all of you who claim that you have a perfect backup.
If you use Acronis for instance to clone your c: drive, and your c: drive goes kaput, then you restore to a brand NEW c: drive, then do you have to REAUTHORIZE all programs and plugins that need to be authorized though?
dan
 

I have never had to re-authorize any software after a clone. But, then I have not cloned my DAW so I can't speak for all the plugs.
Windows, Office, Intuit, etc. did not need to be re-authorized.
Now if you move it to a new motherboard, that's another story as these programs are tied to mobo ID.
 

arachnaut
I prefer Robocopy over Xcopy.
 

There are indeed situations where robocopy must be used (I forget the nuances off the top of my head but path name length seems to be one of them). I do run both xcopy and robocopy, but have found the xcopy algorithm to be quicker. You can actually watch robocopy "think" as it goes, which is slow enough to read, but xcopy just compares the directory structures and copies newer/non-existent files (to that structure).
 
Another point with this is if you use temporary locations (like desktop, etc.) and then "permanently store" things in another place afterwards, that it is possible to create duplicate files. There are utilities out there to scan for duplicates, and I typically do not worry for them unless they are more than 10MB in size. Just be very careful in using such a utility, as they will not stop you if you chose to delete the wrong duplicates. Most have a "protect duplicates in these folders" type of options.
 
 

If you clone, you need to use the whole drive. I prefer image backups, so I can have many versions on a single drive.
I've restored my system drive many times, it only takes about 10-15 minutes. I've never cloned a drive.

dan le
To all of you who claim that you have a perfect backup.
If you use Acronis for instance to clone your c: drive, and your c: drive goes kaput, then you restore to a brand NEW c: drive, then do you have to REAUTHORIZE all programs and plugins that need to be authorized though?
dan
 

No, all licenses will be intact. I have used Acronis for 10 years and have had to replace 2 master drives, both times a seamless plug and play operation. Another nice feature is the speed of cloning, I just made a fresh image after some software additions and upgrades....350G of content cloned in less than 20 minutes.

jatoth

dan le
To all of you who claim that you have a perfect backup.
If you use Acronis for instance to clone your c: drive, and your c: drive goes kaput, then you restore to a brand NEW c: drive, then do you have to REAUTHORIZE all programs and plugins that need to be authorized though?
dan
 

I have never had to re-authorize any software after a clone. But, then I have not cloned my DAW so I can't speak for all the plugs.
Windows, Office, Intuit, etc. did not need to be re-authorized.
Now if you move it to a new motherboard, that's another story as these programs are tied to mobo ID.
 

I was actually successful with installing a clone after a system rebuild that included a new mobo. I wasn't expecting it to work, but it did.

river
 
I was actually successful with installing a clone after a system rebuild that included a new mobo. I wasn't expecting it to work, but it did.

I have also cloned to a completely new machine using the Acronis universal restore. However, in that case I did have to re-authorize the OS and a few apps. But not when just replacing the hard drive on the same computer.