Activation drops whenever I switch drives in my SATA or NVMe hotswap bays

Question

I have a workstation system with a hot-swap SATA drive bay (connected directly to the motherboard's SATA ports, not a USB thing) and a hot-swap NVMe PCIe card installed. I hot-swap drives regularly, often using a specific drive for a specific project or for backing up files. Each time I switch drives in any of my drive bays, Adobe CC "deactivates" - as in, it detects my system as another computer and I have to deactivate the old "instance" in CC.

This is an inconvenience on the surface of course, but what I'm concerned about is that I've seen people get "banned" from CC for "suspected fraudulent activity". For me, my workflow might involve multiple drive swaps per day, so I might be "reactivating" my CC five or even ten times per day. So far this hasn't been a problem, but I'm concerned about it longer-term. I do depend on CC apps and even having them down for a day might cause a serious inconvenience to a project.

As a secondary question, I'm considering upgrading the system with a Thunderbolt interface. Since Thunderbolt is basically exposing a PCIe interface, I'd imagine this would have the same impact when it comes to activations - i.e. if I switched to using an external Thunderbolt drive dock and/or NVMe enclosure and switched drives attached to the TB interface, activation would detect it as a new system?

Using the hard drives in the system seems to make CC activation way too sensitive. Things like RAM amount, CPU, MAC address, etc. make sense, but we all know that in the creative space people are very frequently swapping drives around.

Anyone have any insight? I'm finding myself weary of "trusting" that I'll still have access to CC at some point when I really need it, simply because my specific workflow isn't in line with what Adobe believes people's workflows should be or are...

kglad · Answer

you won't be banned. you're just trying to use adobe cc on multiple computers (though you fail to see it that way) and are required to sign in.

any change of computer hardware is recognized by adobe as a different computer. because you are allowed to use your subscription on an unlimited number of computers (with at most 2 being used at any one time), you can change harddrives all you like. you just need to sign out of the one of the first two when trying use cc on a third computer.

bottom line: if you can understand how adobe discerns one computer from another and if you understand your cc installation limit (none) and cc sign-in limit (two), you'll have no problem thoroughly understanding your situation.

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