Keeping a BI Pc in cold standby

[Swampledge]

Well, after almost a year of uptime, I awoke to find that my BI PC had crashed. I initially suspected a SSD failure, but while poking around I managed to reinstall Windows, reinstall BI, point it to BI reg files backup, and get the system back up and running within 3 hours of discovering the failure. But this event got me to thinking that I want to be better prepared for a future failure of hardware. I’m thinking of setting up a second PC similar to my BI PC with its own BI license, so I could simply start the backup and be up and running while repairing the original PC. Is anybody here doing this?

It seems to me I should be able to figure out my way through this process okay, since both PCs should never be running BI at the same time. My biggest wonder at this point is whether the BI reg files from the first PC would be usable by the backup which would have a different BI key.

BTW, I did a quick search figuring this topic has probably been covered here, but didn’t find anything, so apologies if I’m retreading old ground.

TIA,
Jerry

 

[fenderman]

I dont think its worth buying a second license. You will be able to reuse your old license and/or run in demo mode. You can buy a backup pc for 100 bux though failure is so rare it is likely not worth it.

 

[Swampledge]

I dont think its worth buying a second license. You will be able to reuse your old license and/or run in demo mode. You can buy a backup pc for 100 bux though failure is so rare it is likely not worth it.

Thanks. My thinking was that, if my primary PC died, I would not be able to use it to deactivate my BI license so as to reuse it on the backup PC, without emailing BI support to deactivate it for me. Has that changed, or do I misunderstand?

This time, I was lucky. I think Blue Iris is a bargain, and I count on it to watch my property. As a mechanic, I expect every machine will experience a component failure at some point, and it’s usually at the most inconvenient time. My computer skills are strong, but I had to scratch around a bit to get this machine back up and running, since I hadn’t done anything with it except review clips over the last 9 months. If it had been a hardware failure, I would have been without video for at least 3 days, maybe longer. That’s why I’m looking to have a backup machine ready to go.

 

[fenderman]

Thanks. My thinking was that, if my primary PC died, I would not be able to use it to deactivate my BI license so as to reuse it on the backup PC, without emailing BI support to deactivate it for me. Has that changed, or do I misunderstand?

This time, I was lucky. I think Blue Iris is a bargain, and I count on it to watch my property. As a mechanic, I expect every machine will experience a component failure at some point, and it’s usually at the most inconvenient time. My computer skills are strong, but I had to scratch around a bit to get this machine back up and running, since I hadn’t done anything with it except review clips over the last 9 months. If it had been a hardware failure, I would have been without video for at least 3 days, maybe longer. That’s why I’m looking to have a backup machine ready to go.

I believe if you do it once or twice it will work. It becomes an issue if you install multiple times.

 

[sebastiantombs]

I recently had a major hardware failure but was able to recover enough to get back into BI and deactivate the license before it failed permanently. Same scenario though, woke up to a dead machine that is set to reboot on a crash or power outage.