Unregistered License

Oh wow, now thats an interesting fucntion.

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I use http://sqlbackupfree.com/ for a number of clients, the software is free and handles the backup and scheduling. Itā€™s a bit old now but works fine on Win 10 and all versions of SQL including SQL Express 2017. The same company provides commercial products with more features but thankfully keep this free version available that works perfectly for what we need.

For clients on support we backup daily with this tool separately from SambaPOS and upload to our secure server via FTP, it also has a nice feature you can set data retention rules so for example we keep 3 months of backups on the local system and 1 month on the FTP server.

Never had any licensing issues with this setup. Also I donā€™t think your license issue has anything to do with backups - a backup in SQL server is pretty straightforward and has nothing to do with the license. Doing a backup in any way wonā€™t affect the license on the live copy, unless of course you restore the backup. Having said that, I regularly backup clientā€™s licensed databases and restore to my system, where it is in trial mode, and it does not affect their license in any way.

Given this comment you madeā€¦

Possibly you may want to look there as to what the staff may be doing? I have seem some strange things happen myself too, Iā€™ve seen people trying to (wrongly) reinstall SambaPOS from a non-admin windows user over a copy that was working fine, Iā€™ve seen people copying the whole folder from program files to another computer to try and use on another (or their friendā€™s) system thinking this would get around licensing fees, etc. So a lot could be happening behind your back, and given as you say yourself you we donā€™t really hear about licensing issues with the latest release, Iā€™d usually look to what else might be going on.

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Hi @markjw, thanks for the link, I guess I have plenty of testing ahead :smile:

Emre mentioned that they trim licenses from the backups during the process.

I also found what the problem is and the way it behaves. Basically when you turn on SambaPOS in the morning it will execute that hourly trigger and backup the database. As soon as its done with that, the red flag will appear in the top left corner.

I am sure that if there was a check box option to start the trigger countdowns after the SambaPOS was initialised instead of letting it fire the trigger straight away would solve the problem.

Here is the video. Its barely visible because I couldnā€™t capture the whole screen but its there.
License%20Issue
license%20issue

Now - funny thing about isā€¦ If I just turn off and turn on SambaPOS again it disappears as if nothing happened. Here is a another video.
License%20Issue%20Fix

I am not too worried about it. They dont really have the access to database nor do they hold the password to it. So they will need to setup the database from scratch. Either way they will need to get a license from me or from another reseller that they are close too.

I really appreciate your input. Ill sort out hourly backups through SQL express in the meantime. I am sure this will get solved in one of the following updates :smiley:

Thanks again everyone! :heart:

5.5.8.a. How to Activate License? (Unregistered Trial) ā€“ SambaPOS Knowledgebase for the new users