iLOK betweens

[basslik]

Good afternoon everyone.



I have just acquired another Mac Pro. Am I able to move my iLOK 3 remove my iLok and plug it in the other Mac to use. Of course it would only be used on one particular Mac at a time.



I'm think this would be a great opportunity to / and a back to see how well my upgrade stability is, and have a older version on the ready.

[Sardi]

Of course.

That’s the whole point of a physical dongle... the ability to use your purchase plugins/licenses anywhere by simply taking your iLok with you.


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[Darryl Ramm]

Not only can you move the iLok.. but if you are using these to do staggered installs for testing etc. then remember you can clone a drive and install that clone on the other Mac Pro after testing... as long as all Mac Pro meet minimal system requirements like boot PROM versions etc. You can even connect the Macs and go use target disk mode over Firewire to clone the boot drive between machines. All just a really nice way of ensuring that when you do run both systems at the same OS/Pro tools level that they really are identical.

These 5,1 Mac Pro are great... especially with upgraded GPUs, SSD, and USB 3.1 etc.

[basslik]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Not only can you move the iLok.. but if you are using these to do staggered installs for testing etc. then remember you can clone a drive and install that clone on the other Mac Pro after testing... as long as all Mac Pro meet minimal system requirements like boot PROM versions etc. You can even connect the Macs and go use target disk mode over Firewire to clone the boot drive between machines. All just a really nice way of ensuring that when you do run both systems at the same OS/Pro tools level that they really are identical.

These 5,1 Mac Pro are great... especially with upgraded GPUs, SSD, and USB 3.1 etc.

WOW !
I'm such a noob.

Run both systems at the same time (don't follow?). like two computers working as one >? *sorry, I feel really dumbish right now.

[Southsidemusic]

No one said at the same time but with the same OS/PT/Identical drives for when you switch between them. You can only use one computer at a time with one ilok license.

Originally Posted by basslik

WOW !
I'm such a noob.

Run both systems at the same time (don't follow?). like two computers working as one >? *sorry, I feel really dumbish right now.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by basslik

Run both systems at the same time (don't follow?). like two computers working as one >?

No you use each one separately, but at some point you likely want to match the OS and software installed on one to the other... and you can do that via cloning to a drive and then cloning that back to the other system. But cloning from one Mac to the other in target disk mode (... where one Mac just looks like a disk drive to the other is a very handy thing to know, e.g. https://technology.siprep.org/clonin...ost-el-capitan). Having two macs on different versions of stuff is great for testing... but when you want them to be the same... then make them *exactly* the same by cloning after you know the install you want to clone works. In this sort of setup I'd often have multiple boot drives/partitions/containers installed inside the Mac Pro... able to boot all Mac Pro to identical levels or boot say one of them to a test level... then you are set up for quick recovery from problems.

[basslik]

Right on, I grasped it now. Now what's the general consensus on containers ?. I haven't read much about any major problems except one person I believe who is not liking APFS.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by basslik

Right on, I grasped it now. Now what's the general consensus on containers ?. I haven't read much about any major problems except one person I believe who is not liking APFS.

If your macOS versions support it I would move to APFS.

It's more optimized for SSD but it's robustness on HDD should be better than HFS+.

If you have not already (sorry I've forgot, lots of folks here have...) I would consider moving to NVMe drives on your Mac Pro, M.2 drives in PCIe slot adapters, lots been written on DUC about that before, ... and if I did that I would definitely be running APFS on those drives (well you have no choice but to in recent macOS releases). And folks even have Catalina running on the classic Cheesegraters, but that may be a little more brain surgery than many folks might want to do.

I'm not advocating you just leap in and upgrade macOS or change filesystems, but I am definitely saying you should want to eventually get to APFS... it's a positive not a negative. HFS+ was a tired old file systems, NTFS on Windows was more robust/advanced. Do some reading about APFS, especially to understand what containers do, and how nicely flexible they are. With iOS devices included this is one of the most widely used filesystems, in the world. And hopefully you are already making clone backups using Carbon Copy Cloner, and you can continue doing that with APFS drives. Now you have a second Mac Pro you could do all this playing there first.

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by basslik

Right on, I grasped it now. Now what's the general consensus on containers ?. I haven't read much about any major problems except one person I believe who is not liking APFS.

IF you have SSD's, and IF you have the operating system to support APFS it's the way to go. Advantages like snapshots and containers w/volumes sharing disk space, but be prepared that you have to learn to think about disks/partitions/images and Disk Utitlities in a new way. And TimeMachine is not ready for it yet. You can mix HFS+ and APFS containers on drives, but it can get confusing.


When it comes to drive formating and partitioning just don't do anything rash, and be backed up.
If you buy a new SSD, of course it must be APFS.

I've used mac disk utilities a lifetime and I'm still learning about APFS.

[basslik]

Thanks folks, greatly appreciate the great info.