If I've made a change on one machine and the change has been "backed up" to the "SpiderOak cloud storage". Is there any way I can tell if a 2nd machine is "up to date" (and has that change)?
If so, how can I do this?
I don't know an easy way. In the view tab, you see your devices, and you can browse the files, their backup versions (by date). So in principle it appears you can verify a sync, although I'm not 100% sure the timestamps will be identical for synced files.
Related
How do applications like CloneDVD2 or AnyDVD know that the free phase is over, even if the application was uninstalled and then re-installed? Those applications don't require the user to login so that they could identify the user again.
Also on deinstalling them a window pops up asking whether the "registration files" should be kept or not. Even if they are not kept, the re-installed application knows the demo-time is over.
How is that technically realized?
Could be everything...
You might reverse the algorithm to find out.
But to name an example:
It's possible to generate a hash, based on unique hardware identifiers, of your hardware configuration and send that over the internet to a database.
If your hash exists over there, the software knows you ran it before.
An other option is leaving tracking information inside of your OS. So the checkbox: delete register information, isn't deleting everything.
To test:
1) Switch GPU or CPU :P
2) Format & Reinstall computer
I want to be able to take a snapshot of the current system and will go back to it whenever I mess up with files. I looked at the Time Machine solution, but realized that it's only a good solution when I know what file I am looking for. But sometimes, some installation process creates binary files in multiple system paths, which are very hard to locate and identify. Say I installed a package, but then I felt like I shouldn't have done that. Uninstallation might still leave files around. So What might be some of the graceful solutions to go back to a status of the machine when everything is nice and clean.
Use disk utility (Applications | Utilities)
Click on the HDD and then click on new image. You can choose to have a compressed image or not. If you don't have much stuff on the drive it shouldn't be more than 30-40GB. Once you have the dmg file, stick it somewhere for backup purposes.
Also, create a recovery disk/stick with the recovery tool.
I dunno about "graceful" but Carbon Copy Cloner is definitely an easy solution for rolling back to a previous state. You can make an exact clone of your drive, then restore it back if something goes horribly wrong. I use CCC to make periodic backups of my Macs, as a sort of secondary backup to time-machine, which is easy to use but which I don't have total confidence in.
You can restore an entire system from a Time Machine snapshot, but it requires booting from the Recovery Partition or a Recovery disk. Basically, once you've rebooted in recovery mode, you can choose Restore From Time Machine Backup and then you'll be asked to locate the drive. Once you've done that, a list of Time Machine snapshots will be presented for restoring.
I haven't done this recently, but there are indications that the time of the backups may always be in PST, so be careful when looking at the times.
While OSX comes with TimeMachine, it also has the well-known (in Linux community!) command line tool called rsync.
With Google, I'm sure you can find many articles of how to use it, though here's an interesting blog of why its author uses rsync with Time Machine.
On certain programs you can run them on a demo period for say 'ten tasks' or '5 hours' before you need to decide to purchase them to keep using them, but if you delete and uninstall the program then reinstall it, it knows that its been previously installed and wont let you run the demo again.
How does it do this ? When you download it does it send a identifiing number (ip ?) to the cdn to let it know youve downloaded it before, or when the program itself installed does it check to see traces of previous installation ?
Most "demo" software does this by a feature borrowed from malware: Incomplete deinstallation. A file or registry key belonging to the software is not removed on deinstallation. On reinstallation the software sees the remainder and can act on it.
Often-used hiding places for such a remainder were the system directory (before UAC arrived), but many register some class GUID - nobody I know of has a real overview of which classes in the registry are or are not genuine.
There are many ways this can be implemented.
The easiest way to implement (and also the easiest way to bypass)
On first run, create a registry (or text file) entry somewhere
Add 1 to the counter every time the task (or the app) is run
Do not include this file/registry in the installer app (so it will persist after uninstallation)
If at any time the count is too high, notify the user that the trial has expired.
Using image diff tools this method is pretty easy to identify and overcome.
The hardest method to overcome or bypass is to use a server. On the first run, generate a hash code based on the users computer name, drive serial number, etc, and post this to your server. The server then tracks this as a unique installation, and allows the app to run. Each time you run the app, you update the server. This way, the user cannot find the breadcrumbs and delete them, since they are on your server. The down side, is that this method will require an Internet connection.
There are probably much more sophisticated methods to achieve this result, but the above are both implementations I've run across.
My software drops breadcrumbs within the users system which is used to check for previous installations. This is a little harder to get around (assuming you don't know what you are looking for, or where) than an internet check against your IP. As you can always spoof your connection information, or just disconnect from the internet while installing.
I've asked the very same question here :
Why does my program say "folder does not exist" when run on Windows 2008?
but none of the answers were satisfying and my problem still exists , so I decide to ask it in another way with more detail cause this problem really irritate me and we need to solve this , otherwise we have to write the similar application in another language which means waste of our time.
program written in delphi 7(32 bit)
environment running this program is : windows 2008 r2 64-bit
the task program try to do : creating 3 folders then copy an sound file and compress it using lame commmand line (lame.exe) and save changes into database
error I get : "THE 'folder' does not exist . the file might have been moved or deleted , Do you want to create it?" and it cause the program become halted
things I have done :
1- try to run the program as an administrator
2- check eventlog but no clue
3- triple check the required folder and all of them was correct
4- read this KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927387
BUT still I am seeing this bloody error.
I have uploaded the picture of the error here as you see it clearly :
http://i28.tinypic.com/9to6qr.jpg
The folder name is C:\Upload_ABC\\2010\07\27\:
please notice I haven't written that unwanted dialog-box inside my program I believe windows 2008 attach it or bring it on my application.
please please please give me some idea or let me know what should I do ?
best regards.
C:\Upload_ABC\\2010\07\27\
You have two backslashes in your path. Use debugger to see why.
Have you checked the access rights for that folder structure with regard to the account the Delphi program is running from? Windows Server systems tend to be more restrictive in what a user is allowed to do than Windows on workstations are.
In addition I suggest to strip down a copy of the program to the relevant functionality to show the error. With this you get at least a chance that anyone around may test it on another system.
Furthermore you can try to compile it with D2010 and see wether the error persists. If it does, you might have a chance to find the problem running the D2010 debugger. If you don't have D2010 at hand, you might install the trial just for this purpose.
What is between the two consecutive backslashes in your path? Is there really nothing between them or have some characters been removed because they are Unicode and D7 doesn't support Unicode?
As there is nothing in between the two consecutive backslashes...
It does sound like Windows is getting its grubby little fingers in between your program and your access of the files. Either the folders have not been created, or you are being denied access once they have. And as the changes you are trying to store in your database involve compressed files, virtualization seems to be the culprit as explained by the link you yourself provided.
A couple of avenues to try:
Remove any compatibility settings on your exe (right click|properties|Compatibility tab) that could trigger Windows to butt in. Also don't forget this can be triggered by things like "setup" or "update" as part of the executable name.
"Save your application's data in a folder under your user profile."
Such as c:\users\\documents or some such (better not hardcode it in actual production code, but ok for debugging). That after all is exactly the advice the linked msdn article is giving for scenario 2 "you cannot find the files or folders you just created"
If you can't debug on the machine where it is running, go back to old school debugging: add trace messages to your code to show where in the code you are (and have been) and show them in a memo on a separate form or some such.
Make sure you don't "eat" any exceptions that could give you extra information about what is going on.
I saw this question in a forum about how an application can be developed that can keep track of the installation date and show trial period expired after 30 days of usage. The only constraint is not to use the external storage of any kind.
Question: How to achieve this?
Thanks
Bala
--Edit
I think its easy to figure out the place to insert a question work. Anyway, I will write the question clearly. "external storage" means don't use any kind of storage like file, registry, network or anything. You only have your program.
Use the file-modified date of the file containing the program as the installation date.
I like Doug Currie's idea of the file-modification date. But if the application is downloaded from the web, every night at midnight it gets relinked with new initialized data containing the new expiration date. Then any binary downloaded that day expires on the date given.
If you like, sign the date with a private key so it can't be hacked. Include a public key in the app and decrypt the date. If not correctly signed, hasta la vista, baby.
I don't know if this is possible, as most work I've done has been with embedded systems in which I don't even need to touch the operating system. But would the following be possible?
When compiling your program, leave some extra space at the end (say, 8 bytes), all set to 0. When your application is run, it fetches those bytes and if they're all 0, replaces them with the current time (That's the part I'm not sure about. Does the OS let you do that? If not, there might be some work-arounds using multiple processes.), otherwise, if the time difference is greater than 30 days, it notifies the user that the trial period has ended.
Of course, that method would be vulnerable to resetting the system clock.
If you can't use any external storage at all (not even config files or anything like that), you would need to code it into the app itself so the app's main method (or some method) checks if the current date is less than some expiration date. Part of your installer could actually compile that code on the fly and then it would be set to the installation date. This could be easily defeated by reinstalling the app, but then again, it's not realistic to have no external storage either.
I think the only way to do this generally would be to have your application spawn something off in a separate process that would continue to run and keep track of the date/time even if the main application were closed. When it was restarted, it would then connect to the running process to see if the trial period had expired.
Of course, this would only work if the computer was never restarted and the user never hunted down your spawned process and killed it, which is pretty unlikely. If your application does not do anthing IO-related (file system, registry, something on the network etc.), then a simple restart will wipe away anything that you've done.
So, to summarize: it's not really possible.