Got my Adobe CS6 Upgrade

Well, May 25th has come and gone, and I had not seen the promised email about how to get my CS6 upgrade.

I just found the email in my spam box. It was sent May 15.

It’s not like I haven’t been getting any work done without CS6, but it would have been nice to have a couple weeks earlier.

Anyway, if you haven’t received your email from Adobe about your CS6 upgrade, check your spam folder.

 

Complimentary Adobe CS6 Upgrade from CS5.5

Adobe CS 6 is officially released.

See if you eligible for a complimentary upgrade to Adobe CS6 from Adobe CS5.5. Go here and click the links that apply to you.

If you bought it directly from Adobe and registered it, they will send you an email no later than May 25th with instructions for downloading CS6. If you did not buy it directly from Adobe, you will need to follow these instructions on Adobe.com.

 

Adobe Cloud – Good Buy?

So here’s why I did not hold out for the Adobe Cloud and purchased CS Web Premier 5.5. I thought the monthly fee would be too much at $600/year. It made more sense to me to buy CS 5.5 (later upgraded to CS6 for no extra cost) for about $879, because I knew I would use it for at least 2 or 3 years before I would really need to upgrade again. So if I upgrade in 2 years, that’s like spending $440/year for each year – less if I go 3 years = $293.

Now I see that the Adobe Cloud has an introductory offer of $30/month or $360/year for current CS3 and above users for the first year. See promotion here

So did I make the right decision? My gut says “yes” because I am saving money in the long run rather than pay $360 the first year then $600 the next which will come to $960 over 2 years and $1560 over 3!

What am I sacrificing? The latest and greatest when CS7 comes out. I can live with that.

 

Adobe CS 5.5 Web Premium Upgrade

Goodness, it’s been awhile since I posted anything here. And this is not about WordPress, but about the tools I use.

So I just bought the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium Upgrade. My previous version was CS3 Web.

I was planning to buy the CS 5.5 upgrade from Amazon with my tax refund money. The day my refund was deposited, the price jumped up to $890 from about $750. I could still afford it, but I was not happy about the price increase. Plus news of CS 6 launching soon made me hesitant to buy 5.5 because I did not how much the price would be for upgrading.

So I found on Adobe’s Special Offers page there is a 10% discount for orders over $375. The code is “Spring10”. This knocked down the price to $854 which is $36 less than Amazon’s price.

Now it is important to note Adobe will charge sales tax. Indiana’s sales tax is 7% so my total bill went up to $913. Call me a sucker if you want, but I do believe it is right to pay taxes.

I am a member of Ebates.com and will get 4% of the total $913 credited to my account because I clicked through their site, so I will get $37 back (maybe $34 if they don’t include tax when figuring the 4%). Update: It was $34 – they did not include the tax.

Final amount paid: about $876 $879 (doing taxes put me in the habit of rounding)

Another bonus to buying the CS 5.5 upgrade now was the promise from Adobe that the upgrade to CS6 would be free for anyone who has purchase CS5.5.

Yet another bonus: tax-writeoff! (Thanks to my brother Ryan for reminding me about that!)

TL;DR

Until April 15, 2012, you can get 10% off any order of $375 or more using the “SPRING10” promotion code at http://adobe.com. Plus, you will get the Adobe CS 6 upgrade for free when it launches if you buy Adobe CS 5.5 (full or upgrade). I believe this only applies to the download version. State sales tax will be included in the final price. Get 4% back if you click through Ebates.com.

Check out more at Adobe’s Special Offers page.

Recovering from a database crash

Well, I just recovered from a bit of a freak-out.

One of my web hosts’ databases crashed so a number of the WordPress sites I managed were coming up with “Database connection error.”  The web host techs were quick to fix the database so the sites would come back up, but on one of the sites, all the posts were gone.

My first thought was to restore from a backup. I use WP Database Manager by … so I thought it would be an easy fix… until I saw the most recent backup was from March – 3 months ago.

And my freakout entered into stage two.

After I remembered to breathe, I thought maybe there is an error in WordPress that is misreporting the number of posts.  So I logged in to the MySQL admin and found a message saying several of the tables were in need of repair due to a server crash.

So I ran the repair function in the WP Database Manager plugin (I could have used the MySQL admin’s) and all the posts returned!

I checked the backup settings in WP Database Manager next and just resaved the settings.  It started working again.

So the moral of the story is don’t freak out when all you posts turn up missing.  Check the database for errors.

And make sure your backup is working.