I have written several articles about the features of Stardock Central such as using it to chat with us on IRC, and how to use it to install that really cool Object Desktop you just purchased. I wanted to write some documentation on one of the most important abilities of Stardock Central, and that is using it to archive your purchased software and the goodies that come along with it.
I have been getting a lot of feedback from members about archiving and restoring, so it's time to go over how you can make sure you always have your applications archived and ready for restoration if needed. If you are not familiar of why you should always keep archives of your applications, here are the two best and most popular reasons:
- Being able to easily restore from a crash or reformat of Windows
- Always having your applications on hand, even if you let your Object Desktop subscription expire (but why would you do that?)
- Having the ability to go back to a previous version if you desire
I think you get the point, and I always recommend backing up all your data, but Stardock Central makes this chore easy to do for your Stardock applications. Lets start by opening Stardock Central and selecting the application you want to archive. I'm going to use the WindowBlinds 6 beta as my example today, but the process is the same for any other program on SDC.
Select the application and right-click.
Archiving an application
In the menu that opens you will see several options, scroll down to the "Archive Application" entry and you will see another expanded menu as seen in the screenshot above. You are presented with a few options, but for this I just want to archive WindowBlinds and its skins, so I will select "Entire Application (including skins). Once selected Stardock Central will archive the application to the Backup folder in the Stardock Central directory.
Stardock Central Backup Folder
The Backup folder is located at Program Files>Stardock>SDCentral. At this point you have your archives and would strongly recommend backing them up to a CD or external hard drive. This would probably be a good time to point out when archiving you also have the option to "download and archive" and "download and archive all" which could be easier in some situations.
So now you should have everything archived, so lets move on to what you do if you need to restore the archive for whatever reason. Select the application you want to restore, right-click, and click "Restore Archive". This function is also available through the File menu.
You will see a list of your archived items, and you have the option to browse to the location of your archives if they are not in the Backup folder. Once you have found your archive, select it and hit restore. Stardock Central will restore the archive to the state it was in when you originally archived it.
Restore an archive
You should now have the ability to archive your applications, and recommend doing so as soon as you can. You never know when you might need to recover your software, and its better to be prepared beforehand.
