BETA PowerArchive 22.00.11 - Windows 11 Context Menu duplicated/additional tier

[trparky]

The question that I have about PA archives is what happens if say ConeXware, as a company, dies in the future? What happens to any PA files that are created today? Can these files be decompressed with a copy of a PowerArchiver that can no longer phone home to the mothership thus can’t be registered or activated?

I mean, I can understand that new PA files wouldn’t be able to be created if the program isn’t registered but what about an un-registered copy because well, the question that I posed above?

It’s questions like this that make me not want to store anything really valuable in PA files out of fear that I, at some point in the future, might lose access to said data inside those files. OK, 7ZIP might not be able to compress as heavily as PA but at least it’s open source and any 7ZIP files will still be able to be read and decompressed ten, twenty, or fifty years from now.

[Brian Gregory]

Good question.

Since it’s so quiet in here I will make an educated guess at the answer:

I think if you back up PowerArchiver’s registry data (using regedit) from

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PowerArchiverInt

(It may possibly be

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PowerArchiver

in some cases. I’m not sure)

then restoring that backup will be enough to convince a new PowerArchiver installation on a new PC that it is registered without it needing to phone home.

[trparky]

@brian-gregory OK, that seems to work. I backed up that registry key and tested in a VM, it worked as intended. That’s at least something that we can look at if ConeXware, as a company, were to ever die in the future.

The next thing I’m going to do is try just letting the clock run out on a no registration setup and then see if I can later extract a PA file. If that works, then at least we’ll know that as long as we keep an installer we can extract PA files even if ConeXware were to go belly up.

[spwolf]

@trparky said in Question about PA Files...:

The question that I have about PA archives is what happens if say ConeXware, as a company, dies in the future? What happens to any PA files that are created today? Can these files be decompressed with a copy of a PowerArchiver that can no longer phone home to the mothership thus can’t be registered or activated?

I mean, I can understand that new PA files wouldn’t be able to be created if the program isn’t registered but what about an un-registered copy because well, the question that I posed above?

It’s questions like this that make me not want to store anything really valuable in PA files out of fear that I, at some point in the future, might lose access to said data inside those files. OK, 7ZIP might not be able to compress as heavily as PA but at least it’s open source and any 7ZIP files will still be able to be read and decompressed ten, twenty, or fifty years from now.

Hi,

PowerArchiver does not need to phone home to get registered. You can always use offline code, and you will always be able to use offline code for registration together with that versions installer.

[trparky]

@spwolf OK, but what if you don’t have a registered copy because your Toolbox license has expired? Can you continue to extract PA files? Or is your ability to interact with PA files completely cut off?