On 4/27/2012 5:36 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/26/2012 1:32, andrel wrote:
>> You might be right (no reason to doubt that), but after a crash and a
>> reinstall of windows people tend to write off all programs, and will
>> reinstall everything from scratch. Even people that should know better.
>
> Well, yes. There's little point to keeping the registry around if you're
> going to reinstall programs.
>
>>> Yep. But honestly, I'm not sure what you need to rescue from the
>>> registry. None of your data files should be in your registry.
>>
>> No, but if the programs refuse to run, you can still not access your
>> data.
>
> For what program can you not back up the data separately from the
> program? That sounds rather silly.
>
Registration keys. You know, those things on the backs of manuals, or CD 
cases, or which you are supposed to be able to get from the people you 
bought the product from, unless its a few years old, or they got bought 
up by someone else. That is the sort of thing that gets lost when you 
lose the registry.

And, yeah, there is a copy on the drive, but you can't read it. Windows 
compresses it, or something, unless you specify otherwise, some place. 
The tools to unpack it either don't exist, are not bothered with, etc.

Got a fair number of games that flat won't run without those keys, and 
not all of them are recoverable from the sites they originally got 
registered to. All of which makes things a massive pain in the ass.

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