Hello, I have Storyboard Pro and Animate Pro licenses.
I am building my first computer which I plan on having offline in my bedroom as I procrastinate too much with internet access. 
I am a bit concerned with the licenses though in the event of a hard drive failure. I have had a hard failure before. It was a HDD and so before it packed up, it was making a rattling noise which would mean if I had Toon Boom software at the time, while online I would have had a window of time to shut the program and return the license.
Obviously this won’t be possible if I don’t have internet and also presumably I wouldn’t get any warning like the rattling with an SSD. I picked a Crucial M4 specifically because it seemed to have the most reliable reputation and no other reason. Still, any hard drive can fail and losing those two licenses would be expensive.
I have heard of using a second drive for cloning for data protection to protect against failure, but would this count as having licenses on two drives and therefore not possible?
Should I get a small SSD just for putting the software and licenses on with all work, operating system, anything else on the main SSD so the small SSD can be sent off for data retrieval if it fails?
Is lower performance inevitable if you go this route? I know external hard drives are a bit slow.
Can a failed SSD be sent to Toon Boom so you can verify it had licenses on it? Is this something that can easily be done at a good computer repair shop or could the manufacturers (Crucial in this case) do it or are you generally in a spot of trouble?
Just wondering the best way to go about minimising risk and wondering how this sort of problem had been resolved before. Spending 66 pounds on an SSD which is worth the money anyway is something I don’t mind doing but losing those two licenses would obviously be a disaster.
Thanks
I would be much more concerned about losing your data!
The licence you can clear up in a few days (a few more if weekend). The data toonboom won’t be able to help you with.
It looks like the best thing to do is get another crucial m4 128gb and clone everything then. As I can save both the licenses and data this way. As it is still worth the money, I don’t see it as a waste. I see they have dropped by 15 pounds since I bought one last week. lol.
Thanks.
Of course if I get to the point where I need to use the second ssd, terrabyte HDDs should cost 25 pounds by then so I can clone everything to that and have 128GB more to play with.
Sorry let me just jump in here and clarify something for you guys. When you install a license, it actually installs the license onto a protected storage on your main drive of your operating system. If you clone the whole hard drive, I’m not sure how this affects the license - we can check with the support team for that one. But if you install the application alone on an external hard drive, the license is still saved in trusted storage within the operating system.
However this being said, if you ever do have a hard drive crash, we can manually deactivate a license so that you can install it on a new machine. Naturally if this happens very often then we will investigate, but if it happens only once on your user account, this can be done with little effort. Just keep in mind that licenses can only be fixed during the week, Monday - Friday.
So when all else fails (literally!) email support@toonboom.com !
~Lilly