Sharing an update here in case it's helpful for others. Also, if anyone has any ideas on what went wrong / how to avoid something similar in the future, that insight would be incredibly helpful!
As a quick recap, I had a working install / license from mid 2024 until late 2025. I shut down and removed all equipment from my home theater for several months while I finished up the multi-year build. When starting up myServer, the Pi wouldn't successfully boot and it seemed that the USB stick had become corrupted. I had several backups saved on my NAS and followed the instructions in the
myServer 6 - Master Image Installation
documentation to mount the corrupted USB stick to still access the data. This shortened the recovery time needed once I had a new USB stick installed with the myServer master image to boot from. Everything looked to be going well except for the Dashboard still showing the License Type as "Trial."
Using the
backup / restore documentation
, I followed the instructions to move over a .bak file for the license from 2024 and then used the server command to restore the license - no luck, still showed as "trial." It was suggested that the license .bak file may have been made before the license was registered / licensed, so I went to the myServer\data folder from the corrupted USB (that was fully working several months ago) and copied the license.json file into the myServer\data folder on the new USB stick (replacing the existing license.json file) thinking that this would then restore the appropriate license to the installation. Unfortunately, that still didn't work and the License Type still shows as "Trial."
I took a look at the .json file and in there it does include "isTrial": false but also includes "isNeedsActivation": true. Regardless, I'm out of ideas on how to troubleshoot further and was informed that I need to pay for the services to migrate licensing from one controller to another (despite this being the same controller / hardware). I paid the fee in order to get this resolved and move on but it still bugs me not knowing why the restore process didn't work for the existing license. I plan on moving to a M.2SSD for greater long-term stability but am a bit hesitant to do so until I know I can successfully restore the license on a new boot drive.
Has anyone successfully used the restore license functionality when migrating to a new boot drive? Any insights into how your process may have been different to mine? If anyone has any other ideas on why it didn't work that they'd be willing to share, I'd love to hear them as well.