It's nice to know I have multiple routes to essentially boot my system from a duplicate drive because I'd feel far safer knowing I could always re-copy the image in the event of corruption or disk failure. If I could install the 'master copy' on an SSD or other form of non-magnetic/non-mechanical media I'd feel an even greater sense of security in the integrity of the original.
Yep, it definitively offers peace of mind having an image you can restore in 10 minutes. Now, making the bootable CD is not always an easy task in Toast 3.5.x -specially if you have one of the "problematic" drives like my lovely Teac R55S. It is a great burner, but a bit finicky with Toast. Other models, like some Yamaha's, don't have this compatibility issues. However, a proper burn of the restore file generated by HDT will always be restorable (be it from a bootable CD or an external drive with a System folder and the required software.
I have also gone through the SSD-non mechanical/moving parts- logic regarding hard drive durability and stability -my conclusions are far from what this logic offered in the first place. Magnetic technology is extremely mature, with almost a century of development -not only hard drives of course, but also tape-based storage systems available since the late 60s/early 70s. For instance, the 20MB hard drive in my dads 22 year old (!) PowerBook 145B is alive and kicking and has properly stored all it's files since 93.
SSD technology is not mature enough in my opinion, and most reasonably priced options (that becomes affordable over time) usually don't have the quality components required for long term stability of these drives. Also, in the event of data corruption or damage absolutely no information will be recovered from a flash drive -whereas plates of a dissembled HDD will always be partly accessible.
I basically threw out my Transcend SSD and opted for Samsung Spinpoint 5400RPM drives if possible. For the older 7100/8100 I certainly recommend the Apple branded Quantum Fireball 1.2GB drive. If it's one of the good ones it will last forever.
Please note the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) of SSDs is still considerably lower than high-grade magnetic HDs.
I guess Digidesign didn't care about the implications of a damaged authorization source disk, forever locking your particular auth in place in the system even if you wanted to be able to move it to another system. (Was this the purpose of the "Authorization Backup Disk", to give you a second chance?)
From what I have read in the forums, Digidesign was never quite fond of replacing floppy authorization disks, but where of course required to during the time in which these versions were supported. They were usually quite fast in removing support for older versions. This is probably the reason why the "Authorization Backup" floppies came around at about 3.1. Basically they included extra auths for the system, in a separate floppy with black and white labelling (instead of the color labels in the main install disks, that included auths). I am not aware of v4.0 onwards including any backup disks -please do correct me if I'm wrong.
Masterlist CD -Digidesign approved Red Book CD mastering creation software- also included said backup authorization disks starting from version 2.0 as well as DIN-R 1.0-1.1 onwards.
Does this really mean you had to keep track of which particular disk(s) was used to authorize which particular system? This could get extraordinarily confusing in a large facility, like I was working in, where systems required authorization from multiple disks for all installed features. You'd have to number all your disks and keep a careful log.
Indeed yes, you had to keep track of all disks/particular system they were installed onto -because the authorizing setup will spit out the disk if it's not the proper authorizer floppy. This also applies to the Backup floppies, it will know if that particular auth written to disk was authorized with other disk and spit it out requesting the proper floppy. A bit confusing, but doable considering each Pro Tools editing suite required just one auth (PT auth + TDM auth)
I'm not certain if you're implying a disk with unused authorizations cannot be replicated, effectively multiplying your pool of available auths? Did Digi's applications snoop around your network to check for the existence of duplicate auth serial numbers in the event that someone actually managed to pull this off?
In my findings, each particular authorization key written to disk is individually identified and an exact clone of the authorization floppy will *not* de-authorize an existing auth. The authorization process indicates that it was authorized with another floppy. My guess is that the floppy disk already knows that particular key had already been rewritten to the floppy and deauthed from the hard disk.
So, no retrieving lost authorizations. We would need to locate the original hard drive(s) to which the missing authorizations were written and deauth those drives. Even if you managed to find them, the probability of them still having those auths is slim (probably formatted at some point)
By the way, I have been testing Mac OS 8.6 on a primer install and it works great! No problem using the authorizers, installation went smooth and I can be almost 100% certain PT4.0 will work like a charm. The main difference is the software versions needed for 8.6. That would be Drive Setup 1.73, Hard Disk Toolkit 4.5.2, Norton Utilities 4.0, Toast 3.5.7 and Stuffit Deluxe 5.1.
Same process, same order!
Best,
- MusicWorks
