I just bought a 2TB "Passport" USB portable harddrive from Amazon.  They have it on sale for around $145, which is $100 off the regular price.

It should be perfect for keeping all (I may have to buy another one) my installers and passwords, so they are off of my computer.

All this was brought about by me, disorganised me, realising the tedious task of retrieving all my keys etc from a brace of HDD's. Everything is now in its own folder at least. The info inside that folder needs to be collated but this is just to say, I can find everything quickly. Not that I want to reinstall FSX again, anytime soon.

 

There are many good suggestions here: The cloned HDD idea floats my boat, with all the information organised. The amount of payware I have snuck up on me, too.

 

Jon

I never delete emails so I just search for the product in my mailbox and bring up the order confirmation email.

I have a review coming out in a week or so for 1Password by AgileBits. Organizes serials and much much more.

I use 1Password since the first release, and couldn't imagine living without: it stores passwords for web sites and forums, software license keys (even with attached files), credit card numbers, etc. with strong encryption, and it has plug-ins for most major browsers too.

 

It's available on every possible platform, Windows, Mac, iPad and iPhone and the best part of it, is the Dropbox support, so it can have its database (which is encrypted) stored on Dropbox, so if you run multiple systems, Dropbox will keep all your passwords in sync.

I use 1Password since the first release, and couldn't imagine living without: it stores passwords for web sites and forums, software license keys (even with attached files), credit card numbers, etc. with strong encryption, and it has plug-ins for most major browsers too.

 

It's available on every possible platform, Windows, Mac, iPad and iPhone and the best part of it, is the Dropbox support, so it can have its database (which is encrypted) stored on Dropbox, so if you run multiple systems, Dropbox will keep all your passwords in sync.

 

 

I was looking at their website.  It looks like it would be very good to have.  They have a demo that can be tried for free.

 

https://agilebits.com/onepassword/win

Whenever I get an addon I store everything that comes with it in a dedicated folder.

I also add a text file with the key and relevant URLs.

What happens if you lose your hard drive?

Then you restore a backup.

Because you do make backups, don't you?

I use Excell.

 

And keep a copy on the mobile phone also.

On my second hard drive I have folder called MSFS with subfolders like FSX/scenery/FSDT/KLAX or FS9/Tools/FSUIPC and there I put all the installation files (and updates) and the serials or .key files (if it's Flight1 wrapper files).

 

I then use Acronis Trueimage for automatic file synchronizing once a week(not partition mirroring) the MSFS folder to a second computer in the network. I also synchronize to a USB portable disk that I then keep at work. This is not so important for the msfs-files but rather all my family photographs and videos.

 

I also use Acronis Trueimage to mirror the C: partition to the second hard disk on the computer. So I have a mirror of when Windows 7 is freshly installed, another when all my drivers and utilities are installed, a third when I have installed vanilla FS9 and FSX and finally a fourth one when I have all add-ons installed. It might sound like a lot of extra work but it's so easy to do.

 

Re-installing a 200 GB mirror takes a few hour but I prefer that to the week it takes to install everything by hand.

 

I can also vouch for 1Password. I have it on all my IOS devices and it has replaced "My Eyes Only" that I used before.