ShadowProtect - Activation

I'm going to wait, but if StorageCraft doesn't want to change anything to solve this problem, I can't use ShadowProtect anymore, because the value of the Machine ID is unpredictable due to FDISR and I will always have a problem with installing and re-installing SP.
If I start installing after zeroing my harddisk, install Windows, FDISR and ShadowProtect and I want to activate ShadowProtect it will probably refuse due to the wrong Machine ID and that means I don't have an Image Backup software to take images of my current installed harddisk. That is unacceptable for me.

StorageCraft has to choose something else than Machine ID, because it is not UNIQUE or give me a dummy Machine ID.
I'm glad I tested this in advance BEFORE my re-installation from scratch in September, because it would have been impossible for me to use ShadowProtect due to activation problems.
If they don't solve it, I have to go back to Acronis True Image and that would be a pity.

 

Wow, thanks for the info, I started to get worried here. For a moment there I thought that the copies and archives of the snapshots I have made where useless
As long as I can use any copy or archive of the snapshot where Shadowprotect was installed originally I see no problem.

 

Yes that's true and the Machine ID will be the same as long you copy/update or archive.

But don't install ShadowProtect manually in another snapshot, because the Machine ID will be different. I don't know where SP gets this Machine ID.
I also assume that a new snapshot will cause another Machine ID, but I didn't test this.

P.S. : The Machine ID is generated during the installation of ShadowProtect.

 

Thanks for clearing that. It sure would be nice to know how many "too many" activations is.
Me think I will read the eula once more to see if it is mentioned there.

 

Hi guys,

I contacted support again and they have reset my serial number.
Although ShadowProtect is installed in the wrong snapshot, I'm not going to try anything fancy anymore.
In September I will re-install my computer completely and I will see how ShadowProtect will react. I know alot more now than in the beginning.
Meanwhile I will backup/restore in the wrong snapshot. I can turn off internet to protect my external harddisk.

 

Yes I have been testing this and you don't have to worry about anything.

You only cannot install ShadowProtect a second time manually in another snapshot, because that will create two different Machine IDs and this can cause problems when you want to activate it, because ShadowProtect knows only ONE Machine ID and that was the cause of my problem.

As long you copy/update and archive/restore you will be fine and I'm happy too, because I don't want to lose ShadowProtect.

I believe there is a limit, but support doesn't tell you much, just enough to help you further.

 

So, if I obtain ShadowProtect, I can install it in my Primary FirstDefense Snapshot, use it only in my Primary Snapshot to image my entire system, and everything will be cool?

What if I update my Secondary Snapshot with my Primary which now contains ShadowProtect, so the Secondary would now also have SP. Then in the future, I need to recover my Primary using my Secondary. After my Primary has been restored using my Secondary, will everything still be cool with ShadowProtect?

Acadia

 

This is how I understand it:
Yes you can use Shadowprotect from your secondary or 10th snapshot or 50th archive for that matter, they are all copies of the primary snapshot with the same mashine ID in all copies.
However if you make a empty snapshot and install a new version of XP and install Shadowprotect a second time, then a new machine ID will be generated and thats when you have to activate it.

 

Makes sense, sukarof, thanks.

Acadia

 

Upto now I could install each of my softwares manually in each snapshot without troubles.
My two snapshots are totally different, they have common softwares, but all the rest is different. So I can't use copy/update to update both snapshots, because they would destroy eachother.

First, I had ShadowProtect installed manually in my off-line snapshot, because I didn't expect an activation key, only a serial number. As long I have only a serial number, I can activate the software in my off-line snapshot without needing internet.
But ShadowProtect's activation key requires internet. So I installed ShadowProtect a second time manually (not with copy/update) in my on-line snapshot and that creates another Machine ID and that caused a problem for activation, because StorageCraft concluded that I was installing ShadowProtect on another machine and that is considered as piracy.

In the future, I have to change my off-line snapshot into an on/off-line snapshot, because more and more softwares start using an activation key.
At this moment I can't go on-line in my off-line snapshot, because it has no security software and that is too risky. So I'm going to change this in September.

 

Erik - at one time I was going to try ShadowProtect but then got distracted.
Is there any particular reason why you are sticking with SP ? After all there are a number of Imaging programs available and basically if an imaging Program works then it works. Program like FD-ISR on the other hand are far more interesting and I would not want to be in a position where a run of the mill imaging program prevented me from running my systems the way I wanted.

So is there really anything fundamentally important about SP that makes all this
hassle worth it ?

 

I'm not so familiar with activation keys and now I know how the activation of SP works. I guess that these activations are different for each software.
SP is very reliable and faster than any popular image backup software I tried.
Problems are temporarily, once they are fixed and/or understood, they aren't problems anymore for me. I'm not going to ditch SP, because I had problems with its activation. I didn't buy SP for activation, I bought it for backup and restore and that works very good.

I just don't understand, why ShadowProtect is so protected, while the Recovery CD seems to work without any security protection.
I had SP installed in two snapshots and both were not working due to activation problems, but the Recovery CD worked without any problems.
I find that very unlogical.

 

I probably use the Acronis CD half the time. With DeepFreeze - following advice from Faronics I use the CD for making and restoring.

Speed is important but would I trade a few seconds at the cost of activation ?
I don't think so. I am fortunate enough to be able to spread my work over a number of different machines. Imaging C: takes a maximum of 8 minutes on my slowest machine and the record is 40 secs on my latest set up.

So putting speed to one side is there nothing else to tempt me ? I only make and restore full images and can ( and have done) do it in my sleep. so robustness is not a problem.

Since starting to use FD-ISR, DeepFreeze and more recently Returnil I have found that I am making less and less images of C: in any event. No activation is a real turn off for me.

 

OK, but that has nothing to do with the Recovery CD protection, if the user doesn't use it or forget to use it.

When I rebooted my computer with the Recovery CD, I thought it wouldn't work because I had two different Machine ID's and both ShadowProtects weren't activated. So my whole harddisk was in an illegal state regarding ShadowProtect
and in spite of all this I could restore a previous image with the Recovery CD.
That was good for me of course, but that's not what I call protection.

The Recovery CD can also make a backup, so why do I need ShadowProtect on my computer. I can do it all with the Recovery CD.
It's a pity I have only ONE computer otherwise I would have tried the Recovery CD on another computer to verify, if I can backup/restore on that other computer too.
Of course the Recovery CD is less convenient, slow loading and backup is also slower, but it works and that was bothering me. Not for me, but for StorageCraft.

 

Erik, thank you, and keep pushing these issues ... I am very close to purchasing SP but SP will end up being one of the most expensive programs that I have ever purchased, and I want to make absolutely sure that StorageCraft has it all "together", for lack of a better word.

Acadia

 

There is nothing wrong with ShadowProtect itself.
It has a ready-to-use Recovery CD, no fooling around with BartBe like Acronis.
The same Recovery CD can be used to install ShadowProtect under Windows.
The only disadvantage of the Recovery CD is that the loading is slow, in my case 3m30s, but I can live with that.
I only need that Recovery CD to restore my system partition.

Of course I don't have SP as long as Peter, but until now all backups and restores, I've done were EXCELLENT and Peter has done alot more backups and restores than me with SP, 100-200.

I only hate activation, because they are a pain in my OFF-LINE snapshot, I can't install software anymore without internet connection.
On the other hand, I have to accept these activations, because I already have 3 softwares with activation, including WinXPproSP2.
I was so happy with my absolute malware-free off-line snapshot, where I can work without any disturbance and where everything works faster.
So all these activations will kill my off-line snapshot, but I can't keep on ignoring activations, because they occur more and more in the software world.

The problem I had with SP activation was caused by me, not by StorageCraft.
I have to re-design my off-line snapshot and make on-line activations possible.

So StorageCraft has it all "together" and I consider SP as an improvement.

 

I was curious to see, if ShadowProtect protects itself very well against piracy.
So I googled with "ShadowProtect Crack" (quotes included) and I found several obscure websites.
It might be another software with the same name. I couldn't verify it, because I don't like to visit these websites, because I'm still afraid of hardware viruses.
If it is truly ShadowProtect, I guess that SP is no challenge anymore for crack writers, just like I expected this would happen sooner or later.
I wonder if StorageCraft knows about this.
I would rather spend my time on these bad guys to terminate them, than terminate the paid license of the good guys, which is of course much easier.
After all, these crack writers are responsible for the real piracy.

 

Yup, there seems to be alot of them out there, even though many seemed to try to lure one to register on different sites. But I guess if anyone is dedicated enough they will find the pirated software.

But I dont think the software developer believes annoying protection stops the hard core pirates, they will always crack anything they get their hands on, but rather the casual pirate. I read somewhere that a developer who didnt have any, or very easy, protection noticed a 35% rise in sales when they introduced a harder to crack protection.
That is a sad fact for us who choose to pay for the software.

 

It's not only the hard core crack writers, that is just a very small group.
It's the people that are downloading ShadowProtect and crack it without paying anything and that group is much larger. Those need to be punished.
ShadowProtect and its high quality as image backup software is a good deal for these people considering the high price tag of SP.

 

It's a compromise. We discussed tight protection mechanisms within the recovery environment, but opted not to use them as we felt it would be too much of a burden to our users. Look how much you folks are already complaining about the activation requirements of the installed product. Now imagine that we had extended this to the recovery environment, perhaps requiring it to automatically "call home" if network was detected, or without network to require you to enter a unique boot-activation code which you retrieved from our web page from a different machine that did have net access. I can only imagine the volume of complaints.

 

I agree. That's a pretty astute observation too.

In most cases, the "casual pirate" is simply a person who gets a product key from a friend for a product that has no activation feature. The product key gets reused any number of times for many illegal installations.

Pirating activation-based installs require more than key sharing - it require some reverse engineering, and there's an interesting side effect of taking advantage of a cracker's efforts. It's quite common for crackers to inject malicious code into their handiwork. You're not going to get a virus or rootkit if you install the clean product install from the vendor's website and use a shared key. But for activation-based installations, this isn't an option, and people risk compromising their machines when they install cracked versions of activation-based products, and the growing awareness of this fact, ironically, acts as a significant deterrent to software piracy, ESPECIALLY among security conscious types (enterprise users), who will almost never risk installing a crack. When you target the enterprise market, activation-based installation ends up being a very effective deterrent to piracy. On the same note, if you're targeting the enterprise market and you don't use activation (but just use plain old keys that can be reused by anyone) you'll find that a surprising amount of sloppy piracy goes on (sloppy because often there's the intent to put in POs for additional licenses, but the installs take place on demand and often the POs don't actual get made). I've heard of some resellers (VARs) refusing to resell software with activation because this would prevent them from selling more copies than get reported back to the ISV who makes the software. In other words, it would prevent the VAR from stealing from the ISV.

 

Sorry not followed this thread for a while

- great that is has been fixed but when I encountered the problem - no support was extended at all. Acronis have always tried to help and generally managed to find a solution to my problems - SP did not provide any useful replies. Raxco provided some suggestions. But I basically worked out a solution my self.

That said I liked the software ...but I'm still not ready to trust the support - however I have always appreciated the contribution grnxnm
has made here