Can a clone completely fix a failed drive issue?

[Guitar Binge]

I'm curious b/c setting up my new PC is taking me like a week of every evening downloading-waiting-installing-waiting. Hypothetically, when I have everything I want installed and ready how I like it, if I clone that drive (C:) if it were to crash, could I literally just swap the two and it would be like there was never an issue??? (just pick up from where I left off/when the clone was)

[BertKoor]

If the backup clone is made rather recent: yes, it should work as a drop-in replacement.

What are the odds a disk fails? Not so much these days. I personally think I have spent my time well by not making backups. I willingly take the risk that all can be gone tomorrow. And so is life itself...

[ghettosynth]

Not necessarily. You may need to re-authorize some plugins. The hardware ID of the drive will change even though the partitions are otherwise identical.

[Guenon]

As ghettosynth mentioned, activation issues are the most probable additional chore you would have to deal with - still, all in all compared to manually installing the whole environment from scratch (where you would need to reactivate the new installations in any case), this is still a major, major timesaver, yes.

[ghettosynth]

BTW: This is the win for serial number/keyfile/ilok plugins. None of that is a problem, it just works.

[Guitar Binge]

Okay, thanks for explaining. I may clone it when it's all set up. At least if I don't; the reason it took so long (every evening for the past 10 days) was b/c I was learning what to do while I did it... Thanks again

[rj0]

Not necessarily. You may need to re-authorize some plugins. The hardware ID of the drive will change even though the partitions are otherwise identical.

Have found this to be absolutely true with certain programs/plugins. Quite right.

[planetearth]

I'm curious b/c setting up my new PC is taking me like a week of every evening downloading-waiting-installing-waiting. Hypothetically, when I have everything I want installed and ready how I like it, if I clone that drive (C:) if it were to crash, could I literally just swap the two and it would be like there was never an issue??? (just pick up from where I left off/when the clone was)

Yes. I have a friend who does this, and while I've had to walk him through a couple of things relating to new drive purchases, I've never had to help him with what he's cloned. It's always worked after he dropped the clone in. He has iLok and other copy-protected products and hasn't had to re-authorize anything. (I'm not saying that would never happen, but it hasn't happened with his huge selection of plug-ins.)

As @BertKoor suggests though, a clone is only as useful as its updates. If you clone your drive tomorrow and it fails in November, you may find a lot of updates and new plug-ins you'll have to deal with. Then again, cloning isn't much fun, and you may find yourself putting it off. Either way, you'll want to make sure the cloning software doesn't stay running after you've used it (and almost all do).

Also, if you're using a traditional HDD, you might get some advance notice that the drive is acting up and may fail. With an SSD, you may get no warning at all.

Steve

[rj0]

I actually had this experience a number of years ago, where I needed to recover a hard drive from a clone.

Almost everything went perfectly, except for a few programs. I contacted the developers, and they said, yes, they use the hardware ID of the drive, so I needed a new license. I haven't had to recover a hard drive this way in recent years, so I'm not sure how prevalent the practice is nowadays, but, yeah, it's absolutely real.

[ghettosynth]

I actually had this experience a number of years ago, where I needed to recover a hard drive from a clone.

Almost everything went perfectly, except for a few programs. I contacted the developers, and they said, yes, they use the hardware ID of the drive, so I needed a new license. I haven't had to recover a hard drive this way in recent years, so I'm not sure how prevalent the practice is nowadays, but, yeah, it's absolutely real.

Yep, I recently just upgraded a laptop drive and I didn't want to have to reformat everything so I cloned the drive onto a larger drive and a number of my C/R plugins needed to be reauthorized. This was less than a year ago.

[uOpt]

I think it is outrageous that technical license enforcement would bind a license to a storage device's serial number. Storage is disposable and changes frequently in the same computer.

[Guitar Binge]

Stupid question for anyone b/c I'm new to forums: I've always used this "Quick Reply" panel on the bottom of the screen. If I'm talking to a specific user that sent a reply, I don't see a 'reply' button on their post like in 'G.S.'... Am I supposed to his the "reply w/ quote" marker and go from there?

[ghettosynth]

Stupid question for anyone b/c I'm new to forums: I've always used this "Quick Reply" panel on the bottom of the screen. If I'm talking to a specific user that sent a reply, I don't see a 'reply' button on their post like in 'G.S.'... Am I supposed to his the "reply w/ quote" marker and go from there?

Click the double quotes in the header of the reply that you wish to quote.

[Guitar Binge]

Stupid question for anyone b/c I'm new to forums: I've always used this "Quick Reply" panel on the bottom of the screen. If I'm talking to a specific user that sent a reply, I don't see a 'reply' button on their post like in 'G.S.'... Am I supposed to his the "reply w/ quote" marker and go from there?

Click the double quotes in the header of the reply that you wish to quote.

Okay, thanks. . . I didn't realize that and I caught myself replying to the wrong users in forums.... Anyways, that helps . Thanks