I’m considering cloning my boot drive to a faster SSD drive.
My questions is whether the authorizations will port over to the new hard drive.
I’m curious if other users have cloned a hard drive before and, if so, what your experience has been with the authorizations.
Last time I cloned an OS drive everything carried over without any problems. I don’t have many cloud-authorized items though and most of it is on my iLok / eLicenser so that may make it easier.
What’s your source and destination drives? Are they the same?.. I could imagine a hypothetical scenario where an authorization depends on the hardware configuration to generate a key or similar where you could have an issue. Not sure if that’s likely though.
My new drive is a larger SSD and will plug into a PCIe slot of my motherboard as opposed to the SSD I’m using now, plugged into a USB slot.
USB? interesting…
Afaik Steinberg will clone fine. Again Afaik elicencer is sensitive to gfx card changes, the dongle not of course only the soft elicencer. Some other vendors might be sensitive to a clone. Maybe spectrasonics and NI.
I’ve had pretty good luck with authorizations on cloned drives. I think I may have had an issue or two years ago (don’t remember; it’s been that long), but none recently–that would be within the last two or three boot drive replacements.
Chewy
P.S. as I side note to this thread Macrium Reflect 7 does a great job with cloning.
If your new drive is a Samsung, their cloning software works fine and it’s free. Hard disk based authorizations, including Windows OS, look at a number of factors when deciding if they are go/no go. Usually, if there is no change other than the Boot Drive all is well. Some innocuous hardware changes are general allowed but as stated above, most look at the video card and, for sure, the motherboard and chipset.
It’s kind of a crapshoot so the only real choice is to give it a go and deal with it as needed. You can always disable the clone and plug the old drive in to still work if there is an issue to be resolved with the developer on a license.
This is why I prefer dongles. A slight inconvenience in return for a physical key in my hand versus a mysterious batch of digits hidden in a backwater hard disk sector over which I have ZERO control. Personally, I hate that! Trusting a developer to decide based on my hardware choices as to whether I can use software I paid for (notice I did not say bought…we are only renting) on the inevitable series of newer computers I will own is not my preference.
^^^^^^^^ +1!