What happens if you lose your hard drive?

 

That would suck. But I don't see why it would affect the addon keys. 

I just copy and paste the receipt/SN into Evernote. Since it's cloud based, have an instant offsite backup, and of course, its super easy to find said key when I need it

(With OneNote and Outlook there's even an option built in to export out to OneNote, but I prefer Evernote overall)

 

In fact, Evernote and OneNote are used to store just about any relevant or useful electronic snippet I may need to refer back to (cfg tweaks, reg hacks, tutorials, scripts, Excel formulae, shared recipe book and on and on and on)...

The Cloud. Now, that's a good idea. My headlong leap into the new millennium hasn't embraced this aspect. My thoughts were that, in the Cloud, I would risk the forces of evil naughty men stealing my NGX key. I'll check it out.

 

Jon 

I control them........

 

But I have found that the addons that tend to make me work the hardest at it are the ones that are not re-installed later. I would say that keeping track of keys and updates is one of the number one reasons why my purchases have become so sporadic.

 

When the almost inevitable re-install eventually occurs, it just becomes more and more annoying to dig through all of that stuff. (Bleah)  :unsure:

 

 

 My system also has front-panel slide-in hard drive bays and that allows me to cold swap backup drives of the identical model to my primary drive

I've got 2 at the front of my new box. Technology begins to move too fast for this old mind but apparently they're 6 gbps. Is that good?...and let me assure you in the most vehemently possible way, that ' mine is bigger than your's'. This case is both the most stupid and best thing I've ever done. Cooler Master Cosmos 2. It didn't come on casters but should have. 49 lbs. Empty.

 

To be hot swappable does the drive need to be any special type? ie Can it be done with older sata drives?

 

Jon

That would suck. But I don't see why it would affect the addon keys. 

No! Do not speak its name. I don't have it backed-up, yet. My life from here on out is back-up city. I can't organize FSX and in my new system I have 3 Flight Simulators, 2 of which I have not yet defiled.. Time to take the pledge and back-up my back-ups.

 

Jon

I've got 2 at the front of my new box. Technology begins to move too fast for this old mind but apparently they're 6 gbps. Is that good?...and let me assure you in the most vehemently possible way, that ' mine is bigger than your's'. This case is both the most stupid and best thing I've ever done. Cooler Master Cosmos 2. It didn't come on casters but should have. 49 lbs. Empty.

 

To be hot swappable does the drive need to be any special type? ie Can it be done with older sata drives?

 

Jon

 

LOL! First, you can read my system specs in the sidebar. No OC, no water cooling, system now almost two years old. Cannot do anything about hyperthreading (if I wanted to) as there is no option in BIOS. Nice Gateway gaming system but not up-to-today re: performance.

 

In regard to swappable drives.... You might read my post again. Cold swap (system off), not hot swap. Can it be done with older sata drives? Not sure. It is dependent on the size and position of the sata and power ports on the back of the drive. The drives snap into a poly cradle with handle before sliding them in. They have to line up, and I am not sure what to look for in terms of drive description. What I did was ID the specific model of the 1.5 TB Seagate drive in my system (screw in bay/cabled) and ordered two of that identical model from Amazon. So at that time I had the primary wired drive and two to clone. Once I clone I do not leave the clone in the bay. It goes on the shelf in the closet. Early this year I upgraded from the Radeon 6750 1 GB vidcard that came in the system to an EVGA nVidia Gtx560TI OC 2GB. Since I have a three year warranty on the system I cloned the primary before making the vidcard swap, and locked that clone away in case I ever need it for warranty purposes (swap the Radeon back in). At that time I ordered another (3rd) drive to use as a clone. So I still maintain  two ongoing clones. One up to 30 days old and the other up to 60 days old.

 

Great protection for all the hours I have into everything. Email, personal finance, and especially the hundreds of hours I have into FSX. DL's, add-ons, repaints, panels, MSE sceneries, etc. Also great protection from viruses, maleware, and Windows Update (LOL). (yes, I do have a top tier AV program as well as MalwareBytes).

 

Staying true to the topic under discussion, this is how I safeguard not only all of my installation keys, but also how I safeguard all of the time and effort I have invested in my overall installed FSX flying environment.

I'm in the notepad club myself. I was in the same boat and didn't keep any track whatsoever of my serials and downloads, so I learned this lesson the hard way a few years ago. It took days to get it all together, but once I did I created a simple notepad file organized by developer, in alphabetical order with the addons in alphabetical order beyond that. After 3 full reinstalls (2 due to system changes), I can say it was the best decision I ever made in this hobby.

 

I simply picked up a 1 TB external HDD, and everytime I purchase an addon, I save the file to my desktop and my HDD, and update the notepad list on both the desktop and the HDD. The files on the HDD are seperated into Aircraft, Scenery, and Other (FSUIPC, AS2012, AccuFeel, etc). Then, inside those folders the addons are seperated by developers. You can even go farther than that in organization, for instance in my Aerosoft scenery folder I have it seperated by regions (Germany, Greece, etc.).

 

Lastly, I keep a second notepad list of what I have installed already to keep track.

 

It does take time to get started, but it is welllllll worth the effort. Made those horrible reinstalls a great deal less of a pain, and lets you pick and choose what to install when.

LOL! First, you can read my system specs in the sidebar. No OC, no water cooling, system now almost two years old. Cannot do anything about hyperthreading (if I wanted to) as there is no option in BIOS. Nice Gateway gaming system but not up-to-today re: performance.

 

In regard to swappable drives.... You might read my post again. Cold swap (system off), not hot swap. Can it be done with older sata drives? Not sure. It is dependent on the size and position of the sata and power ports on the back of the drive. The drives snap into a poly cradle with handle before sliding them in. They have to line up, and I am not sure what to look for in terms of drive description. What I did was ID the specific model of the 1.5 TB Seagate drive in my system (screw in bay/cabled) and ordered two of that identical model from Amazon. So at that time I had the primary wired drive and two to clone. Once I clone I do not leave the clone in the bay. It goes on the shelf in the closet. Early this year I upgraded from the Radeon 6750 1 GB vidcard that came in the system to an EVGA nVidia Gtx560TI OC 2GB. Since I have a three year warranty on the system I cloned the primary before making the vidcard swap, and locked that clone away in case I ever need it for warranty purposes (swap the Radeon back in). At that time I ordered another (3rd) drive to use as a clone. So I still maintain  two ongoing clones. One up to 30 days old and the other up to 60 days old.

 

Great protection for all the hours I have into everything. Email, personal finance, and especially the hundreds of hours I have into FSX. DL's, add-ons, repaints, panels, MSE sceneries, etc. Also great protection from viruses, maleware, and Windows Update (LOL). (yes, I do have a top tier AV program as well as MalwareBytes).

 

Staying true to the topic under discussion, this is how I safeguard not only all of my installation keys, but also how I safeguard all of the time and effort I have invested in my overall installed FSX flying environment.

A very interesting post. So, you could take one of the clones and drop it straight into a new os provided it  is the same generation, without going through all this anxt. What a dream way to upgrade to better hardware. I'm with you here

 

Jon

 

 

Staying true to the topic under discussion, this is how I safeguard not only all of my installation keys, but also how I safeguard all of the time and effort I have invested in my overall installed FSX flying environment.

After reading your post. Have you any ambitions to run the Dept. of Money? If you're that organised, now, You'd wing a job like that.

 

Jon

I'm in the notepad club myself. I was in the same boat and didn't keep any track whatsoever of my serials and downloads, so I learned this lesson the hard way a few years ago. It took days to get it all together, but once I did I created a simple notepad file organized by developer, in alphabetical order with the addons in alphabetical order beyond that. After 3 full reinstalls (2 due to system changes), I can say it was the best decision I ever made in this hobby.

 

I simply picked up a 1 TB external HDD, and everytime I purchase an addon, I save the file to my desktop and my HDD, and update the notepad list on both the desktop and the HDD. The files on the HDD are seperated into Aircraft, Scenery, and Other (FSUIPC, AS2012, AccuFeel, etc). Then, inside those folders the addons are seperated by developers. You can even go farther than that in organization, for instance in my Aerosoft scenery folder I have it seperated by regions (Germany, Greece, etc.).

 

Lastly, I keep a second notepad list of what I have installed already to keep track.

 

It does take time to get started, but it is welllllll worth the effort. Made those horrible reinstalls a great deal less of a pain, and lets you pick and choose what to install when.

Yes, I think it takes a cruel lesson like this to make someone like me, think before acting. After all, your's is a very effective system as many are that have been presented in this thread. I will probably end up using something similar once I corral all of it. The one's that are a total bugger are ones like ASE where you get the initial code from a link, don't write it down and the link times out. I've got a few of them.

 

Jon

 

 

A very interesting post. So, you could take one of the clones and drop it straight into a new os provided it  is the same generation, without going through all this anxt. What a dream way to upgrade to better hardware. I'm with you here

 

What makes it work is the fact that with the cabled primary in place, and the clone in the slide-in bay, I can put a simple notepad file on the respective Windows desktops that tells me which is which.  Then I can boot to the BIOS settings, change the boot options to the clone drive, let it boot, and verify via the notepad file that it with certainly booted to the clone.  Once that has been verified, I shut down.  I remove the clone.  Then I boot the BIOS settings again, select the cabled drive (I do have a second non-bootable cabled drive installed) as the boot drive, and continue on, with the clone removed and safely on the shelf in the closet.

 

With the Seagate Disk Wizard the cloning process takes less than an hour for a 1.5 TB hard drive.

 

This has saved me twice.  Once from a problematic Windows Update, and once from a corrupted FSX issue.

 

 

Yes, I think it takes a cruel lesson like this to make someone like me, think before acting. After all, your's is a very effective system as many are that have been presented in this thread. I will probably end up using something similar once I corral all of it. The one's that are a total bugger are ones like ASE where you get the initial code from a link, don't write it down and the link times out. I've got a few of them.

 

Wow.  I guess I am lucky that I have not had that happen.  Would like to say I have been diligent to avoid those possibilities.  Caveat emptor (buyer beware).  But its not that.  In my case it appears to be luck.  The only add-ons I have lost are some that I purchased for FS9 before I migrated to FSX.

Wow.  I guess I am lucky that I have not had that happen.  Would like to say I have been diligent to avoid those possibilities.  Caveat emptor (buyer beware).  But its not that.  In my case it appears to be luck.  The only add-ons I have lost are some that I purchased for FS9 before I migrated to FSX.

Mr. Organization here, again. I have 3-7 Win7 Pro OEM DVD's. I don't know which one is the new one and all the others are on activated drives, some of which are already installed in both computers. I especially recommend the high tensile 6 inch nails to snack on, at this point. viz: Bazil Fawlty shaking his fist at sky.

 

Jon

I use Keepass which is by default a password manager but is also good at storing keys, notes, account names and passwords, you name it.

I use Keepass which is by default a password manager but is also good at storing keys, notes, account names and passwords, you name it.

I downloaded it. I think it might be the tool. Thanks for that.

 

Jon