I've not needed to solve this particular problem because we pay for all our CS3 licenses. However I use 'asr' to image our Macs, and also I am concerned with our $1500 software becoming useless if an activated hard disk crashes, so I've been looking for a way to back up licenses. In general, if you are trying to figure out where a program stores something on a Mac, try this procedure: 1. follow the subprocedure, rebooting off your main partition for step 3. This will show you which files change during a normal reboot. It'll probably be some spotlight files, fam files, and files in /var/log. To some it may be obvious, but not everyone. This is a list of files to ignore when they change. 2. follow the subprocedure, doing whatever you're trying to monitor in step 3. For example, you might install photoshop, activate photoshop, then surround ``step 3, boot up, deactivate photoshop, shut down'' with the subprocedure. This way you can see what files change when you deactivate photoshop. The trick for finding where things are stored on Windows machines is somewhat similar, except you have to use a bunch of awkward Windows tools to do it, and the registry is involved so you have to use a registry-'diff' program. What I tried was to activate photoshop, backup the files I found in step 2 with 'ditto' (to save extended attributes), deactivate photoshop, and then restore the files. There are only about four of them. This does not work. I speculate they are storing the inode number inside the files, but I don't really know. What does work, is to activate photoshop, backup the _entire system_ using Disk Utility/asr, deactivate photoshop, then restore the system. It's not strictly necessary to deactivate, though, to solve my immediate problem of losing licenses when disks crash---if you have an ASR backup of your system with all the adobe products activated, and your disk crashes, then you can restore the backup and they'll be activated again. You won't have to call up Adobe and grovel and plead and beg them to understand that your disk has crashed just to get access to the software you paid for. The reason it's better to deactivate before the backup, is that after your machine breaks you might not be able to create a machine Adobe's anti-piracy consniders similar enough to the one on which it was activated to stop it from saying ``The license data is no longer valid.'' Definitely if you feed it an identical machine with a different MAC, it won't work, so if your motherboard gets fried you lose your activation. Activation could possibly be keyed to disk serial, too, which would mean you would lose it if your disk crashed even with the ASR backup. I haven't checked that, because the deactivate-and-restore works around it. But if Adobe ever took away the Deactivate option, I'd have to dig into this. When I get more time to spend on adobe anti-piracy nonsense what I plan to look into next, is mounting a disk image with hdiutil onto the subdirectories in which the license files are stored, before activating. By backing up the disk image instead of the files inside it, the inode number of the files will not change. I'm sure they've their interests well in mind, and it seems some people are so hypercapitalist they will agree with anything Adobe does as long as it's in Adobe's interest and not done just to piss you off. But for an IT guy I think it's appropriate to consider my OWN interests, and this anti-piracy stuff seriously interferes with my doing my job and consumes gigantic amounts of my time, even though our shop is 100% legitimate, such that whenever there is a competitive alternative without it, I leap to it. It's actually one of the big reasons I press for replacing Windows machines with Macs and Ubuntu boxes: the Mac OS piracy control is through the TPM chip, just ``you can't run Mac OS on a non-Mac'', which doesn't interfere with imaging many machines to a single master .DMG. While with Windows, I have to go through an activation dance every time I put a standard image onto new hardware, unless I'm a big player with some complicated business arrangement with Microsoft. Even a dreaded USB dongle would suit my purposes better than the mess I have now, provided the dongles never broke and worked well with VMWare/VirtualBox. But at least on Windows I can save the WPA.DBL files for when disks crash, and this _does_ work provided enough pieces of the broken machine survive to make the WPA.DBL considered valid, for Windows itself. It doesn't work for Office, nor does it work for Photoshop on Mac. I expect the forum admins will delete this post to cover their scared little butts, but it's a bit ridiculous. The annual failure rate of SATA disks is about 2% per year, which is more than I'm prepared to lose in software licenses. subprocedure: 1. boot off some other volume (firewire, CD, extra partition). I always image my macs with two partitions, 'Mac OS boot' and 'eschatology', so I can boot off the backup partition and mess around with the main partition. It might not be strictly necessary to do this, though. 2. open a terminal and cd /Volumes/ where partition is probably Macintosh HD or something similar find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5 | sort -b > before 3. do whatever it is you're going to do from the larger procedure (reboot, install photoshop, activate/deactivate photoshop) 4. repeat step 2, but sort -b > after 5. diff -ub before after > changedfiles less changedfiles -----8<----- plutil -convert xml1 -o - Users/cashier/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.alm.adobel mbundle.plist ./Library/Application Support/.Adobe Systems1.21.005.uct2 ./Library/Application Support/Adobe/Updater/AdobeESDGlobalApps.xml ./Library/Preferences/Adobe Systems/Product licenses_120/B2B86000.dat ./Users/cashier/Library/Caches/Adobe/Color/ACEConfigCache1 ./Users/cashier/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CS2 Paths ./Users/cashier/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings/Color Settings.csf ./Users/cashier/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.alm.adobelmbundle.plist