Allway Sync

[Executioner]

How about this if you need to reinstall: disconnect from the internet. Have your key ready when installing. I would think this may work, but not sure what would happen if you then connect to the internet.

[FlyingPenguin]

Come to think of it, if I remember, once you buy the key, it is generated for your hardware and should always work.

So as long as your hardware doesn't change much (mobo, CPU), your key is probably good on that PC for life, even on fresh installs.

What you won't be able to do is generate a key for new hardware.

I did poke around in dark places, and there are warez key gens for it, but not sure I'd trust them.

I did google around and found this competitor that has good reviews and seems to work similarly (it has a sync as well as backup functions) and has a one time license: https://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbpro.html

[FlyingPenguin]

Okay, maybe confusing this with another piece of software. I don't think it's hardware locked. I think you can only use one license at a time on one machine and would have to uninstall it to move it to another machine. I'll have to go back and check my notes. But when I checked my list of licenses I have three licenses but only two are in use. The other one's a spare.

I did email them and they replied saying:

You are free to continue using Allway Sync, it will not stop working. Your license will remain valid for activation of Allway Sync Pro. However, we don't plan to continue the development and support of Allway Sync.

[Executioner]

OK thanks for the update.

[normalicy]

I was wondering what everyone's opinions on this were. Sadly, my fears appear to be verified.

FP, have you got a bit of a tutorial on backing up the registry/config files of any sort?

[FlyingPenguin]

Did you try to reinstall it and it failed to register? Because support said the license should continue to work.

I'll have to check my notes, but there's probably a couple of registries in the usual places, and then an allway sync folder in one of the three APPDATA folders.

[FlyingPenguin]

Well I was forced to find a replacement for Allway Sync when I built a new file server a couple of weeks ago.

I found an excellent replacement that's free and open source called FreeFileSync: https://freefilesync.org/

Does everything Allway did, but better, with a much cleaner and easier to understand GUI.

There are donation and a business versions that enable a few extra features, but for most people the free version will do it all. I opted to buy the $20 business version to support them, and get the easy to use built in email notification feature.

You can do scheduled backups using Windows Task Scheduler. You have to setup the jobs in task scheduler yourself, but it's easy and the manual has instructions.

I really like it. It seems faster than Allway, and the logs are very easy to read.

[Executioner]

Thanks for the heads up on this replacement. I still use Allway Sync, but if I can't get it to work when doing a fresh install, I'll switch over to this version.