Unable to Transfer 2021 Trados Licence and TM Data to New PC – Forced Upgrade to Trados 2024

Question

I had a still valid 2021 licence. I had to buy a new PC. Impossible to transfer my licence correctly on the new machine. So I had to update to Trados 2024. I bought Windows 11 pro as well. Impossible to find and/or transfer my several years' long collected memories. Everything is lost. And so RWS attack the core of Trados. Why buy it? I have to retranslate everything. The Trados idea was I would never have to do this. So why not work again without Trados? Translators will start to think like me.

Paul · Answer

Renate Radziwill-Rall 
 I moved your post into here where it should be. 
 We can probably offer more help if you post a question with information that explains exactly what your issue is. I think you have these problems: 
 
 Impossible to transfer your 2021 licence correctly on the new machine. 
 Impossible to find and/or transfer your several years' long collected memories. Everything is lost. 
 
 I note you moved to 2024 anyway so let's start from that point to keep this straightforward seeing as you upgraded so you don't have access to 2021 any more. I also noted you seem to have activated 2024 so it seems safe to assume that you have a working and licenced 2024 on your computer. 
 That leaves just problem 2. With the information you have provided here it's not really possible to give you a helpful response because you have not explained why you cannot find them. The reason I say this is because translation memories are independent of the software itself. They are just files you create, *.SDLTM files, to store translations in, and they reside wherever you have decided to put them. So if you cannot find them this is really a problem of file management and not really Trados (or RWS for that matter!). 
 The normal approach to resolve this is to search your computer in windows for *.sdltm. This should find every file on your computer with this extension. Have you tried that? Do you know where you put them in the first place? Did you use an external drive, some cloud drive perhaps? 
 I think if you want some sensible help with this, and we are very willing to support you, then you need to provide a little more information than simply telling us everything is lost. 
 I would also add just to respond to your post that there was no reason why we could not move your licence to another PC. The process is not to "move" it, and if that is what you were advised then that was very poor advice, it is as follows: 
 
 deactivate the licence on your old PC 
 install 2021 on your new PC 
 activate the licence 
 
 It really should be as simple as that and if you had problems with this we would of course have supported you in that process too.

Jerzy Czopik · Answer

Renate Radziwill-Rall 
 In case your TMs seem not to have the expected content, not everything must be lost. 
 There are several possible scenarios for this: 
 
 You open a TM in Trados Studio. You see just few entries. This may simply be caused by the view in Trados, where only a limited number of segments is shown per page. This is the most simple case. You can check the TM by right clicking its name on the list on the left side of Trados window (in the so called navigation pane) and chose "Settings". This will show you the number of segments in the TM. If this meets your expectations, everything is OK and the problem is solved. 
 Otherwise you (your technician) may have picked not all or wrong TMs. Let him look on your old PC and search for sdltm files. 
 Should all TMs be really already copied to your new PC and not contain what you expect, then maybe the TMs were not updated during your translations. Either segments were not confirmed or the TMs were not set up to be updated. In any of this cases, your translations are still in the sdlxliff files. 
 Should this be the case, you can still import your sdlxliff files into your TMs and get all your translations there this way. In this very case you can use the import function and select "Add folder" to add all sdlxliff files contained in all subfolders in that very folder. The import will take some time, but in the end you will. have the translations in your TM. The default setting will take only segments with the status translated, translation confirmed and signed-off. However, you can also decide to import segments with other status, just change the appropriate setting in the import process. 
 
 PCs do not "lose their heads". Content of the files is not being removed when files are copied or moved. And files are not deleted by the PC on its own. So if everything was fine on your old PC and you were able to reuse your translations from the TMs, the same must apply to the new PC.

Trados Portfolio > 2. Licensing and Installation

Unable to Transfer 2021 Trados Licence and TM Data to New PC – Forced Upgrade to Trados 2024