The country-specific help pages describing offline use of the Creative Cloud are confusingly written, and there is a big discrepancy between the US page and the pages of other countries. My interpretation of the US page is significantly different than other contributors here. It would be great if @Rikk Flohr: Photography could obtain an authoritative explanation of the actual policy (or policies, if they vary by country) and get the help pages more clearly written.
The US page implies that annual members get from 99 to 129 days of offline use before the user must connect to Adobe servers and monthly members get from 30 to 60 days.
The relevant sections of the page are:
"The apps attempt to validate your software license every 30 days."
Based on the underlined instances of "99 days", the "grace period" must be the number of days after the first failed license check that you can continue to use the app offline.
So a more precise description of the policy is:
The app attempts to validate your license every 30 days. If the app fails a scheduled check because the computer is offline, then you may continue to use the app offline for a grace period of 99 days (annual members) or 30 days (monthly members).
In more detail:
- The app attempts to validate your license every 30 days.
- 30 days after last validating the license, if the app is offline, a dialog box requests an online connection. You may dismiss it and continue to use the app offline.
- 60 days after last validating the license, another dialog box appears. If you dismiss the box, then if you're a monthly member, you can no longer use the app offline until you connect to the Internet; if you're an annual member, you can continue using the app offline.
- 99 days after last validating the license, dialog boxes will appear daily. You may dismiss those boxes and continue to use the app offline.
- 129 days after last validating the license, one final dialog box will appear. You can't use the app until you successfully connect online and validate the license.
Thus, an annual user who goes offline immediately after the last successful license check can use the app offline for 129 days (30 days until the next license check + 99 days grace period). But if she goes offline just less than 30 days after the last successful license check, she can only use the app offline for the 99-day grace period.
Similarly, a monthly user can use the app offline for 30 to 60 days, depending on when she went offline after the last successful license check.
So the middle cell of the table above should read:
- Annual members: 0 - 30 days + grace period of 99 days
- Monthly members: 0 - 30 days + grace period of 30 days
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All Other Countries
The corresponding help pages for other countries are different from the US page. I've checked country codes ca, fr, ie, it, no, nz, jp, sk, and uk, and they all have the same table and footnote as au:
https://helpx.adobe.com/au/creative-cloud/kb/internet-connection-creative-cloud-apps.html
"The apps attempt to validate your software license every 30 days"
This description is incoherent. If annual members get "99 days of grace period" (red-underlined), then "5 to 30 days" (blue-underlined) can't also be the grace period.
We saw that on the US page, "grace period" meant the time after the first failed license check in which you can continue to use the app offline -- 99 days for annual members, 30 days for monthly.
We also saw on the US page that "30 days*" really meant 0 to 30 days, depending on when the user went offline after the last successful license check.
So here, "(Varies from 5 to 30 days)*" is likely referring to that same initial interval, from the last successful license check to when the user went offline. But where does the number "5" come from? I suspect the writer got very confused trying to simplify an engineer's description.
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