How do I recover a previous installation of OrCAD

[Richard Burroughs]

I have a license for OrCAD 17.4 and recently had to reset my laptop, and in the process lost my installation. I had purchased my copy through EMA-EDA, and when I contacted them, they said that my maintenance agreement has expired. The only option they gave me was to purchase a new maintenance agreement for $850/year, which OI can't afford. Is there any other way I could recover it? Is there any way to reinstall it from the old installation footprint? Thanks for any help that could be offered.

[lwdco]

Do you have all the licensing and registration information? If so, it should just be a simple reinstall through either EMA-EDA or Cadence - I did it when I had to switch to Windows 10 from Windows 7, years ago and long after my maintenance agreement expired. If you have no backup copies of that information, then you're probably out of luck.

You do design work without a robust backup system in place? An external drive or cloud subscription is way cheaper than another copy of software, plus all the lost work...

[Richard Burroughs]

Yes, I do have backups of my registration and licensing on an external drive. I thought I could just go through the download manager, or through Cadence using my Host ID, but when I tried that, I got a message that (The Host ID you entered belongs to a different account.) I contacted EMA-EDA again and was able to get temporary access to the downloads page. As far as design work, at this point I am just doing small simple stuff, at least until I get a bit better with using OrCAD. I bought this copy a few years ago because I saw a great deal on the EMA-EDA website at the time. I had not used OrCAD much since version 9.2, and a lot has changed since then, so I am going through a book and learning all the new features when I'm not at work. Thanks for your input.