I purchased 1 Corel 18 licence upgrade today and was asked if I wanted to buy download insurance. Previous experience with download insurance from another vendor, was its a scam usually limited to a year, where as if one bought or made a disk it was good until lost. So I asked if I could make a disk of the download instead and was told that was fine as long as I knew how.
Anyway what is downloaded is only a starter program at 2346 megs, so my concern is this means when Corel quits support I can not re-install 5 or 10 years down the road. I have 4 additional licences of Coreldraw with Corel purchased disks and am thinking maybe I should hold out on the previous editions if they won't provide full installation disks. Or if buying the upgrades save to Corel 16 so they can be opened when 18 can't be installed any longer.
Do others see this as an issue?
Also for those using Windows Backup, have you had to do a restore and if so did the Corel program restore, or were you limited to Windows and your software files, with a need to re-install Corel program.
I've previously done cloned workstation backups with Clonezilla.org but would like to be lazy and use Windows 10 if it will restore programs to a working state.
Thanks,
Ken
Ken, from an IT guy, take your hard drive backups seriously. There is no lazy allowed in computer land. When things fail, they don't lazily fail...they tend to catastrophically fail most times without warning. If your computer gets owned by a hacker, most times you don't get a warning...
Is your data (and the time it takes to restore corrupt or lost data) critical to your business? If yes, then then you must adopt computing behaviors that reflect that. Or you'll find out the hard way one day that being lazy was not the right decision.
Hard drive imaging software such as CloneZilla (free/Open Source) and Macrium Reflect (free and paid versions) are essential to keeping your house (computer) in order. You CAN schedule backups to off hours so things will occur while you're on lunch say. You can do incremental backups or whole drive backups. You can mount saved images and extract files at will. Honestly, it sounds like you've not really learned how to use CloneZilla properly because it should be the only way you backup your machine. Not faulting Microsoft for their built-in backup ability, but it's not in the same league as drive imaging software. With some of these software packages you can even make a virtual computer out of the image you saved to run within a real computer. Kind of like using the free Oracle VirtualBox software.
I can't answer the first part of your question exactly about media downloads (Corel themselves will have to get you that information about specific download media you paid for) but you can make your own backups of any software downloaded to an external drive/media. There's nothing stopping you from saving trials or full downloads to a drive for back-up along with your CloneZilla hard drive images (as well as keys or login info). The thing is with a drive image, you can restore a fully working computer environment in minutes rather than going through the pain of installing things again from scratch.
Get an external hard drive and use it - regularly. They're cheap and will save your behind one day.
However, I do support your point about Corel dropping Content/Extras disks like they used to have years ago. But I believe that's a piracy thing and helps push people to subscriptions (which they seem to love more than anything) but which I hate more than anything. The 2.3 GB file you downloaded is the program installer and not the 13 GB worth of extras content. So you have a valid point with this in my opinion.
I do have Clonezilla backups Drew as I have been bitten by a RedoBackup.org backup failing.
As it happens my Laptop with Coreldraw 100 is about 90% done on a Windows Image Backup to external usb drive in a dock. The primary issue with Clonezilla image backups is they are intended for the same hardware and can only restore a complete drive letter or disk. If the box is destroyed or stolen and the replacement is a Dell instead of a HP ones got issues. Maybe thats also true of Windows attempt at image backup and having programs run again after. Anyway that is why I believe the Coreldraw software does need the ability to restore to a different system and either require a call in or maybe better provide a warning that the previous same serial number will be deactivated or prevented from use while this is active - a non issue as the other drive or computer was destroyed.
I will try and fit another Clonezilla backup to my docked drive for safety but if the Windows image backups are images and install programs so everything works its easier than booting from a USB to do the backup.I am not sure of Windows 10 capability in that regard and would like to hear from .those that know in that regard.
Thanks, Ken Graham