Restore time! (What about my plugin licenses?)

[wingmanmac]

Since 10.13.6 turned out to be a bag of hurt on my system, I now consider for the first time to restore to 13.5 via timemachine backup. I searched around but didnt find an exact answer on my worries. I have a bunch of plugin licenses on my mac and other programs that I asume are not very happy for being overwritten or copied to a different system. Or is this not a problem since I will restore from my own system? Will my licenses (stuff not installed via appstore) be intact after a restore, or do I have to install and reautherize all or some of my stuff? I worry mostly about the Waves plugins, plugin alliance, ikmultimedia and many others and I dont know if I have the energy to start all over again.. will restore bring back the system as I left it before I did the 10.13.6 update?

 

[techwarrior]

I have done 2 restores in the past two weeks, both restored all license without a hitch. i did have to re-authenticate on a few, like MS Office 2016, Box, DropBox, OneDrive, etc. But all SW license were restored.

When you do a restore, if TM was backing everything up and restores everything (rather than selective restore), you should be fine. Most should be stored in either the Application bundle, or in /Library/Application Support.

 

[wingmanmac]

thanks for the answer Tech!

 

[AnonMac50]

They usually work. I have done tons of restores over the years and only one app I had wouldn't work afterwards due to licencing. So while it usually works there are the odd cases where it might not work. Granted that was 8 or 9 years ago so I don't know if it's still the case or if something about Time Machine changed.