What Your License Covers
Updated July 17, 2026
What Your License Covers
Hiberden has one license. There are no tiers, no editions, and no subscription: you buy it once and it is yours, perpetually. Current pricing is on the register page.
One license, one machine
A license can be active on one machine at a time. After purchase your key arrives by email, and activation makes a single online call; from then on the license is verified offline on your machine, with no expiry and no phone-home.
If you reinstall Windows or clear the license on the same machine, reactivation is self-service: enter the key again. Activating on a different machine requires a short email to support, who release the old activation first. See Moving to a new machine for the exact steps.
What the license unlocks
A license unlocks archiving: writing new archives and organizing your catalog. Before you buy, the 30-day trial gives you every feature; when the trial ends, archiving is the only thing that stops.
Restore and verify are always free
This is the most important part of the license, and it is a contractual promise, not a courtesy. Restoring your data and verifying your copies work with or without a license. The License tab in the app states it plainly: "Restoring and verifying always work, with or without a license."
The EULA makes this binding in section 3, and the promise survives even termination of the license. If your license ever ends for any reason, you lose the ability to write new archives, never the ability to read, restore, or verify what you already wrote.
Your catalog and your data are yours
Nothing about the license stands between you and your bytes:
- Every archive is one standard TAR with a documented JSON sidecar next to it, the same layout on disk, NAS, cloud, and tape. Standard tools can open it. See On LTFS, the JSON sidecar, and the format spec.
- Your catalog is a local SQLite database on your own machine. There is no hosted account, no telemetry, and nothing to cancel.
- Tape cartridges are ordinary LTFS volumes, readable on any LTFS-capable system without Hiberden.
If Hiberden ever disappears, your tapes are still your tapes.
Refunds
The 30-day trial is the evaluation period, so try everything before you buy. The full policy, including how billing mistakes and defects are handled, is on the refunds page.