I had to do a complete re-install of my work's server the other day, had plenty of backups (as you always should), reformatted, installed OS X, got everything back running again, thought all was good with the world.
Then came to setting up the scheduled backups that run at various times to backup the mail databases, user directories etc etc.... For this we use Roxio's Retrospect backup 8. Popped the CD in the drive, installed away, ran the administration program to be prompted by a "insert product key" dialogue box.... :o/
Now the CD was just lying on the desk by the server, you think i could find the box with the manual and key and what not....
After no luck searching around google and the like i started looking inside the uninstalled scripts to find out what files were put where to see if i could extract the key from the cloned backup of the OS disk i had. Turns out most of the files reside within /Library/Application Support/Retrospect. Good.
First method of attack was just to copy the old directory over the new one in the hope that it would pick up the old configuration files including the key. No such luck. Due to the Retoengine daemon running in the background, most of these files are in use and therefor can't be copied over. Stopping the process doesn't help as it re-spawns before you have a chance to copy the files. Now i didn't try copying it as root from terminal but that may have worked.
Second method was to uninstall Retrospect completely, copy the directory over, then reinstall the application. I didn't have much hope for this method as i just assumed that the installer would just overwrite the directory i'd copied over. However, upon running the uninstaller, i noticed that a lot of the configuration files were still in the Application Support directory... ahah!. So copied the backup version of the directory over the top of that one, reinstalled the application and Bingo... one working retrospect :o)
Onto the next issue.... getting the update server the work.... dum de dum....
HTH
Rob