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Migrating to a New Machine

Moving your drives (and FileGriffon) to a new PC takes a few extra steps beyond just copying the database over — do these before you compare new hashes against your existing history, or Protected-vault comparisons will silently fail to match.

Why this matters

If any of your vaults use the default Protected (HMAC-keyed) hash mode, their stored hashes are keyed with a secret unique to your current install (see Security & Encryption). That secret lives in the Windows Credential Locker, not in the database file itself — so copying filegriffon.db to a new machine copies your history, but not the key needed to make sense of it. Without the same secret, the new install can’t tell whether a file matches its recorded hash.

Raw-mode vaults aren’t affected — their hashes are plain checksums and work correctly on any machine as soon as the database is copied over.

Steps

  1. On the old machine, export your recovery key: Settings → Security → Cross-Machine Recovery Key → Export. This exports your install’s HMAC secret (currently as plain hex — treat the exported file like a credential, not something to email or store in cloud sync unprotected).
  2. Deactivate your license on the old machine: Settings → License → Deactivate License. Licenses are tied to a single machine, so activating on the new one first will just fail or use up an activation without freeing the old one.
  3. Copy filegriffon.db (and your parity/ folder, if you want existing PAR2 data to keep working) from C:/ProgramData/FileGriffon on the old machine to the same location on the new one. Do this before first launch on the new machine, or before adding any vaults there.
  4. On the new machine, install FileGriffon, then import the recovery key from step 1: Settings → Security → Cross-Machine Recovery Key → Import — before running any scans.
  5. Activate your license on the new machine: Settings → License → enter your key → Activate.
  6. Point your vaults at the same paths (drive letters/folder paths) as before, if they’ve changed on the new machine, then run a scan to confirm everything still shows as OK rather than flagging every file as changed.

If you skip the recovery key step

Nothing is destroyed — but every file in a Protected vault will appear to have “changed” on the new machine’s first scan, since the new install’s hashes won’t match the old ones. You’d need to either import the recovery key afterward (before accepting anything) or manually Accept every file as a new baseline, losing the ability to tell real corruption apart from the machine switch itself.