Can I run two Capture One versions on the same computer?

QUESTION

I have just installed Capture One 20. Can I also keep the previous version of Capture One on my computer?

ANSWER

It is generally recommended that you only install one version of Capture One on a single computer.

NOTE: Before uninstalling the older version of Capture One, make backups of your catalogs and sessions you plan to work on in further.

Once you make an upgrade and install the latest major release of Capture One, you will need to upgrade your catalogs and sessions to take advantage of any database enhancement already available.

Running two versions of Capture One on the same machine is not recommended because that may cause erratic behaviour of the software and some other issues such as:

• Upgraded Catalogs/Sessions won't open in the earlier versions of the software. However, if your Catalog/Session was created in Capture One 12 and then upgraded in Capture One 20, you can still revert back by restoring those from a backup. Find out how to restore a Catalog database or recover a Session from a backup.
• The owners of perpetual licenses who have purchased an upgrade will get a new license key, while an old one will be disabled. Feel free to use your new license key, as Capture One licenses are backward compatible, to reactivate a previous version of the software upon necessity on another machine. However, activating two Capture One versions with the same key on the same computer might cause an error as each activation is associated with a hardware ID (two activations with the same hardware ID are not possible).
• While two Capture One versions are installed on the same machine, the files from both versions are kept in the same system folders. This may cause unstable and erratic behavior of your photo editing software.