Having troubles with licenses after clone

[jwhitley]

Originally Posted by rock15478

I don't understand why it would be doing this to programs that I've never had a problem with before. This is only recent. The only thing I can recall changing was updating to the newest version of SD about a month or two ago.

I thought a clone was an exact clone? Shouldn't that keep all licensing intact?

It used to.... (for these specific programs)

As a rule, never depend on activated licenses to be preserved across any backup or clone strategy. On OS X, Keychain's secure notes and 1Password both work well for this purpose. These repositories will be correctly backed up by SuperDuper!

A bit of exposition on licensing systems:

As Dave indicates, many licensing systems deliberately incorporate strategies to defeat copying as an inherent aspect of their role in preventing software piracy. Even a perfect copy of the data on the disk isn't sufficient to ensure that a license will work. Frequently the secure license metadata store will contain various serial number and signature information about the original system, disks, etc. Thus a perfect copy of the license data may not work in a new or restored system because that system is "new." Most vendors attempt to accommodate scenarios such as part upgrades, but the software still may fail activation if the overall system is not deemed the same as the original based on the licensing system's heuristics. Similarly, some software may attempt an automatic re-activation, e.g. upon a restore to a new system. However, reactivations usually have limits (a fixed number, a rate over time, etc.). Thus a restore of licensed software working once is no guarantee that a restore will work a second or third or tenth time.