Transferring to new computer

Does anyone have experience of using apps like Zinstall or PCmover / Laplink to move Cubase to a new machine?

Hi,

If you want to transfer your personal Cubase settings, use the Profile Manager in Cubase.

see Featured function: Profiles

If it’s below version 12, just re-install it – the USB dongle can be moved to the next computer.

If it’s version 12 or above, you’ll want to deauthorize the source PC before you move things over. And I’d probably still just re-download and re-install, rather than trying to move it, because I prefer to avoid potential future problems. If I used a “mover” tool, and something didn’t work a month from now, I wouldn’t know whether it’s because the mover missed something, or not.

And, no, you can’t “clone” licenses of Cubase 12 using a “software mover” tool, that doesn’t work, so the only thing you’d save would be the download time, which really doesn’t seem worth it compared to the potential trouble and uncertainty.

Last year I’d been thinking about getting a new PC when a disk failure rescheduled everything to right now - so no real prep or planning before migrating to the new PC. One thing I did that helped a bunch was to copy (in this case from my regular system backups) the entire AppData>Roaming Folder onto the new PC before installing anything. After installing Cubase everything was exactly the same. And not just Cubase, other programs too.

The biggest pain has come from Content location changes. On the old PC my sample libraries were spread across a handful of smaller SSD’s added over time. So I took the migration as an opportunity to consolidate the libraries. Now when I open an older Project I often need to point it to some new locations.

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Thanks but I don’t think Elements has that.

Thanks, makes sense. Looks like I’ll have to put a weekend by to re-download it all!

If you still have the original distribution downloaded on your old PC there’s no reason to re-download it onto the new computer, just copy it over.