Listen, that five minutes of completely fresh install is worth the two to three hours of complete annoyance as you reinstall applications. Got your emails backed up? How about your contacts, billings database, cha-ching database, and omnifocus database? Yeah? What about all of your serial licenses?
That’s the latest issue I had in my endeavour towards freshly installed bliss. Luckily for me, I had a copy of AppShelf that I religiously update, and never hosed my backup drive. There’s rarely an application that made me beam from ear to ear in a day, but AppShelf did it for me today.
All it does is let you manage your serial information for programs. It’s simple, simple, simple. You can export that data as a CSV or a proprietary format, and then you can import it when you install it again. Save yourself a headache in the future, and find yourself a way to back up your license keys. I’d recommend starting with AppShelf, it’s simple, and it gets the job done. There’s no bells and whistles, and there’s certainly no room for error. It might seem like a tedious process, but once you get your applications up to date, it’s really simple to maintain.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this who debacle today it’s that we seriously need better application management moving forward, maybe something like the AppStore… how’s that grab you?
