i’ve been reading through the FAQ and i understant the basic of licensing, activation, deactivation and so on.
Question is as follow: i find myself more often than desiderable with the necessity of restoring an image of the system disk (win11), and for that purpose i use Acronis True Image (but i guess it would be the same with disk image backup solution).
So, i run my backup every few days to be on the safe side.
Restoring the system image after a failure (wich may very well be the system unable to boot) doesn’t impact with any of the licenced products i use (daw, an embarassing amount of plugins, and so on) with only one notable ecception, being it a very populary VSTi synth that seems to make deeper checks on the system: every time i restore an image i have to re-authorize it (wich is not a big problem: i can always access my profile online on the vendor website and “delete” the previous activation, that now is seen as “another computer”).
This “whole system check” for the licence is used for many of my licenced software but only that one goes so deep to think that it’s being run on a different machine.
My question, related do SynthV is: did anyone find himself in the situation to have to restore a whole system image?
If yes, was SynthV ok with it or it was thinking to run a different machine, ence “burning” one of the 3 activation coded?
It’s quite an important topic to me, so any help/answer would be very welcome.
If SynthV Studio detects that it has been moved to a different machine (including hardware/firmware changes, OS reinstallation, or restoring a system image) the activation will be invalidated.
There is no way to reclaim an activation except by deactivating manually from within the application while the activation is still valid. The application does not connect to the activation servers after being activated to check for revocation, so there is no way to do this remotely.
Damn, this is quite bad.
I mean, i fully understand the need for the protection, but the risk to have licenses invalidated by system problems is really high, at least, in my case.
I can’t say for certain that doing a system restore will always cause SynthV to detect that it is no longer on the same device, but there is some risk there.
As for the activation invalidation, each product code can be used three times before activation is rejected entirely. Deactivating the product “refunds” one of these uses to be transferred to a new device.
If you do end up in a situation where activation fails due to system issues, you can request the count be reset by contacting [email protected] (though there’s no guarantee that they’ll do so).
That, right there… I’m curious; I undestand win11 will not run at all unless the computer has a TPM chip (Micro$oft’s way of taking ownership of a machine you thought you had bought).
When you do a restore is there any issue with revalidating Windows itself?
I also wonder if this parasitic TPM has any effect on a restore, making the system look different to SynthV and its voice licenses???
It should be the opposite. The entire purpose of the TPM chip is to prove a device’s identity based on hardware instead of software, and therefore ensure the integrity of security tokens.
If Dreamtonics were to make use of the TPM chip then presumably they’d be able to verify that SynthV is installed on the same device even after a system failure (though I don’t expect them to just come out and say how exactly they detect the “hardware fingerprint”).
You are right there, but at the same time it’s trivial to make it run without one.
None.
In theory (and i underline that), an image backup, made with a tool like Acronis, should be a 1:1 copy of the HDD. But, of course, it’s not exactly the same.
Nope, TPM doesn’t have the power (and it wasn’t made) to modify the system in any way.
AFAIK, atm, no end user commerciale product is using it to authenticate licenses, even if, in theory, it could. I guess the install base for W11 is still too tiny compared to the previous version. Also, an enforcement of that kind would probably create a mass migration on Apple OS and/or Linux.
Since i’m such a lucky guy, yesterday i bought and activated SV (together with a purchased voice), then immediately did a backup with Acronis.
This evening my PC failed to boot (not a SV related issue), so, after trying everything i had to restore the previous backup without the opportunity to deactivate SV and the purchased voicebank.
When the restore finished i booted up, loaded SV and… it works without any problem.
So, i guess the activation is mantained restoring a previous backup (made with a decent software).
I’m and Acronis user as well and I think unless one specifies the backup to be sector by sector it will not be 1:1, The default backup strategy is to backup used areas only to both reduce the size of the .TIB archive, but also the time it takes to backup. This means that if Dreamtonics “hides” the activation in a sector that is not registered as used by the file system then it won’t be backed up. However I believe that sector by sector backup should get it and restore it.
I said the same on a previous post in this thread, and yes, you’re totally right.
My backup strategy is a standard incremental one, with no sector by sector option (i used to do it - then i went for the normal one) - and that’s the one i restored succesfully.
To hide activation details directly on single sectors on the HDD would be quite complicated technically speaking and, anyway, not possible running SV without administrative privileges.
