Storing Serial Numbers

[essjay]

I seem to have a whole bunch of serial numbers for apps after Mac Heist and Mac App A Day and I want a safe way of storing them in case everything goes awry. At the moment I've put the serial numbers in the spotlight comments of the files. But obviously this isn't great if the disk crashes and I have to re-download and reinstall. I've put them all in Devon Think as well. Has anyone got any tips for storing serials? I know Wallet does it but surely if your disk crashes then thats gone as well.

My first idea is to email them to myself and tag them with 'serial' in Gmail. How safe would that be, given that Gmail is still 'beta'.

[Equin]

Pretty safe I would say, GFS (google's own distributed filesystem) is awesome. There are multiple copies of everything spread across different racks and powersupplies. If one copy goes offline for some reason then it's instantly copied elsewhere, always several layers of redundancy.

Article about it here: http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/...1985047,00.asp

If you're really paranoid about it why not print it out and have it on paper somewhere safe?

[Shpigford]

Well you really should be doing backups anyways. Seems your treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem here is that you'd lose everything if your disk crashed and sure, emailing your serial numbers to your gmail account would work, but you still will have lost all your other files.

So instead of worrying about keeping your serial numbers safe, you should be doing regular backups of all your files and then everything would be safe.

[essjay]

Originally Posted by Shpigford

Well you really should be doing backups anyways. Seems your treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem here is that you'd lose everything if your disk crashed and sure, emailing your serial numbers to your gmail account would work, but you still will have lost all your other files.

So instead of worrying about keeping your serial numbers safe, you should be doing regular backups of all your files and then everything would be safe.

Ah, but I backup my documents to a box.net drive via an applescript. Or at least I did until their secure WebDav service stopped working. Previously, on Windows, I either used FOSS or I had the disks to go with it which inevitably have the serials printed on them (I'm thinking office). Its not really something I've ever thought of before. As an aside, I'm waiting on a USB HD for local backups. If I carried on with using spotlight comments, would they still be there if I backed up to an External HDD and then restored? Or would it depend on the method I used for backups?

[Shpigford]

Originally Posted by essjay

As an aside, I'm waiting on a USB HD for local backups. If I carried on with using spotlight comments, would they still be there if I backed up to an External HDD and then restored? Or would it depend on the method I used for backups?

You should definitely be doing local backups.

I do full nightly backups with SuperDuper. Doing something like this mirrors your harddrive...so yes it'd keep your spotlight comments as well. But it would also depend on the method you use. For instance, if you decided to only backup certain files, then it obviously wouldn't backup the comments.

But honestly, going the spotlight comment route just seems a bit risky as well as disorganized. Seems it'd make more sense to just keep them all in a simple text file, or something like (as you mentioned) Wallet.

[Yuiichi]

First of all, thank you to Google's search history for bringing me this article.

Although it's built-in to OS X, most of us don't even think of using Keychain to store sensative information. This Macworld article talks about "Keychain's Hidden Powers". It's a great read, and also is pretty much exactly what you want.

[mdmunoz]

I put them in plain text on a thumb drive, ipod, and gmail, or backups of the applications (most of my stuff is one-version only prizes).

To put an application in gmail, gdisk is cool.

[MarkFleser]

I just printed them to a PDF and zipped them with the installer since most of them aren't transferrable to a different version it works fine. I put all those in a folder and I'll eventually burn it to a CD. It's redundant too since Gmail archives all my emails and I archive them on my local machine as well as putting them in that folder.

With apps that I buy I put them in my Web Receipts folder, and since they come via email they're in Gmail already.

[divigation]

I'm with Mark, all of my email is archived, but I save the install files in a folder and when it reaches a CD size, I burn it with a PDF file that contains each app's serial/registration info. Then I generally write the serials on the CD as well, just to be safe.

[sprint]

Well, I definitely wouldn't keep them in Gmail.
I've had an account disabled by no reason and lost everything on it.
Bad experience.