I’m assuming that, being an upgrade/update, 6.5 installs into the existing 6.0.x installation, so:
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Is that the case?
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Would renaming the 6.0.x EXE be enough to give you an option to launch either?
Obviously an update will update an already existing installation, seems a quite common procedure. (And I say this without really knowing it, just by using common sense.) If you want to revert back to 6.0 you uninstall the 6.5 update, as has always been. Also does not seem too complicated…
Does that work? If the EXE has been overwritten, what is there to uninstall back to?
Make an image of your system disk. That way you can revert to things exactly as they were before the upgrade, should there be any problems.
Until now it did. In the worst case the exe is reinstalled from the install disc.
Which is the best of all solutions, though not too many seem use that here…
Thanks for the suggestions, chaps, and I do take note but I still wouldn’t mind knowing about saving the old EXE to a new name first so you can run either without having to go to such lengths. I’m only asking because there have been changes to e.g. the lanes and I’d want to be sure I could get back to existing projects should anything unpredicted happen, if you know what I mean, although there was a recent post from a mod that said that either version will open either’s files.
You could try it. It would certainly be unsupported, as in Steinberg would not guarantee it, since many of the dependant dlls may have changed to suit the needs of 6.5. That is, when you fired up the 6.0.x version it would be using the dlls that may have been updated to work with 6.5. It might be able to gracefully ignore new stuff, or even benefit from bugfixes in dlls.
Then again, it may simply not work, or be very buggy.
There may be a way to install 6.5 into a different directory, keeping both versions completely intact. If you really need this, that’d be my bet on safest scenario.
You sum up my concerns well. I could try it but it’s a bit late to back out if it goes wrong, unless I do as you suggested and create a new install. It may come to this.
Well, for now, let’s keep this going until I take the plunge. I wonder if anyone from SB could ask the dev team what the score is on this idea of having new and old EXEs in the same install, on the lines of “whatever you do don’t do it” or “yes, could work but proceed at your own risk”.
I have the same concern on Mac, and would love to hear from a mod.
Is it possible to have both 6.0x and 6.5 and be able to use either?
I suppose it’s a bit much to ask anyone who’s going ahead with the upgrade to be the guinea pig…
bump-important for me to know. Can’t upgrade with projects on the line without knowing if it’s possible to revert to my present state.
Re-bump.
I’m not sure how to safeguard from potential problems on Mac but in windows why not utilize System Restore? If you have this enabled any update / installation will invoke the creation of a System Restore Point. You can also manually create a System Restore Point any time you want to.
You can allocate disk space which will be used to store the System Restore Points. It doesn’t require many GB’s of disk space to get a fairly large amount of usable restore points.
Once you decide you want to revert back to an older installation you can choose any of the available system restore points.
Also, when you install an update which has the option of an uninstall, the original files that’ll get overwritten will be cached/stored and if you uninstall the update those original files will be restored (all of them). But I usually just do a system restore because that way I know for sure it will work out perfectly.
The disk image method described earlier is obviously also a valid solution but it takes much more time and work to create and restore the image. Usually they are also quite large so you’d have to store them externally (which will make the creating and restoring process slower). It’s too much of a hassle and with the System Restore option built into Windows, basically not necessary to go through. Just make sure you have System Restore enabled before you install the update.
If you don’t know where to find System Restore or don’t know how it works, use Google. You will find everything you need there 
Going to repeat what someone else suggested.
A simple image backup takes around 10 - 20 mins (usually quicker).
I have 4 hard drives in my machine, my C and D drives contain Windows and my various programs, my E and F drives contain various Native Instrument Libraries, my Cubase Projects, my documents, my videos etc.
After I install windows and install all my programs and set them up how I want, I do an image backup of my C and D drives and store it on my E drive (I use trueimage stored on a USB drive).
This means that should anything ever screw up, windows start running slower etc, a simple 20 mins spent doing an image restore and my projects and documents are untouched, but my computer is back to it’s newly setup state. I then simply run windows updates and I’m ready to go.
If a lot of things have new updates, sometimes after updating it, I will create a new image backup and get rid of the old one.
Once your into this habit, things are so much easier to look after in my opinion.
Then when something like 6.5 is released, you can simply backup another image before you try the install, if you don’t like it, it takes 20 odd mins to get your PC back to its previous state.
Really seems to bee not complicated enough for some…
What’s a “PC”?
Removed…
Trouble is, a system image is a fail-safe way of getting your system back to exactly the same way it was, system restore is not guaranteed to.
A restore will not protect you from a corrupted partition or hard drive failure (or a lot of viruses etc)
A system image you know exactly the state your system is in when you make the image and it will be 100% the same when you restore the image.
Unless things have changed from when I last used it, restore deletes older restore points to create newer ones and while the amount of disk space it uses is adjustable, if you use it all up, your original restore points will get deleted, hence you cant go back to your newly installed and newly setup system state.
I’ve just done hardware changes hence have reformatted my system.
A newly reformatted win 7 64 system, all updates applied, office 97 fully installed, Adobe CS5 suite fully installed, all my often used programs installed (kindle, printer s/w, itunes, vlc media player, TVersity etc etc etc). System set up with all My documents, public folders etc on my E drive.
I simply plugged in the True image USB, booted off that, cant remember exact names, but it’s as simple as
click on backup
click on disks you want backing up (C and D)
Browse to the disk you want the backup stored on (E drive) and give the backup a name
click on archive validation (checks the backup worked ok)
click on proceed
Takes less than 10 mins to complete and the size on my disk is 17.3 GB
If I needed to restore,
Click on restore,
Browse for backup file
Select which disks from the backup I want to restore (all of them)
Select which disks to restore to (not hard, I restore my 400GB D drive to my 400GB drive etc)
click proceed.
Once done, remove USB, reboot PC and it’s there.
In fact I have often spent longer on friends PC’s waiting while their PC’s chug along for 30 odd mins trying to do a system restore than it would to do the above. But in my case I have a perfect system, theirs has only gone back a few weeks.
I then installed the following games. Bioshock, Borderlands, Elder scrolls Skyrim, Portal 2, Max payne, Lord of the rings Online, Starwars The Old Republic (both Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are huge) and did another full backup, this time it obviously took longer and the backup size was 82GB
I then installed Cubase 6, updated to 6.5 and installed NI Komplete 8 and did a final backup (NI libraries being put on my E drive along with My Documents, Cubase projects etc)
and finally did another full backup, this time it was 86.1GB so someone doing what I did but not using it for the games, would only have to find 22.1GB and if someone has a 2TB hard drive, the default setting of system restore takes up more space than that (12%)
I only did the backup after my games as it took so long to install them that I wanted to easily to be able to go back to that point, should I screw up the installation of my Cubase and Native Instruments packages. Once I had Cubase and NI installed, I deleted the 82GB backup.
So in total I needed 103GB to store my two backups, again system restore uses 12% as default, so with that turned off on say a 1TB drive, you are using no more space.
I have system restore permanently disabled on all drives as it’s just as quick (and end up with a better restored state) to use trueimage
Should my system die for some reason and need to be reformatted, I can simply spend 30 secs kicking off trueimage, then go make a coffee, watch a bit of TV etc then come back to a fully setup and 100% working system in EXACTLY the state it was when I did the image backup.
System restore can be useful on a home PC just used for web browsing etc, but personally, having used both I would always use system imaging every time.
I do of course also backup my e and f drive files to an external hard drive (including the image backup files), so should one of those hard drives fail, I’m still ready to go.
That´s those computers which they told you don´t work at all…
OP here, stop that right now, please!