Adobe activation issues and backups

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Hi All!,

Has anyone had experience with restoring from a drive image (specifically True Image) with Adobe Acrobat or any other Adobe software installed with the same Flexnet licensing and activation scheme? Is it necessary to deactivate each time before restoring an image? Given the limited number of re-activations allowed, I would prefer another option. Instinct tells me that a sector by sector backup would be best, but that hogs a lot of space. On second thought a sector by sector would restore my disk with the identical file layout on the disk as set up by Ultimate Defrag 2008…hmm. Anyway, if anyone has any thoughts, please chime in.

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I’m assuming this is for the purpose of restoring to a single machine and not for imaging multiple machines. There is no reason that you should have to reactivate whatever imaging scheme you use. Where you’d run into trouble is if you restored an image that didn’t have the Adobe products on, and then did fresh installs every time you restored. Even then, a call to Adobe would get you back up and running again. They don’t really care how many times you activate, just explain what you are doing. What they care about is installation on multiple machines, or unauthorized license transfers.

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Chuck,

Adobe did tell me that there was a distinct limit on the number of re-activtations allowed. My other concern was that there might be something on the drive that the image would not capture when backing up. I had heard that at one point an identifier was stored in a way that would not normally be imaged. It seems now that the Flexnet files just need to be in the right places on restore.

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Interesting. Another reason to hate Adobe I guess. Did they tell you what the activation limit is?

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Chuck,

As I recall, there were 3 reactivations. However, at the time I didn’t ask if that applied to a specific time frame. I know Microsoft will give you 3 or 4 a year as normal.

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It might be per year. I’ve had to reinstall PS CS2 more than 3 times in the past two years. No trouble with activation.

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