Restoring an image backup from one computer to another.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. I
have had people get downright angry when they hear my answer
to this problem. And it's really a fundamental
misunderstanding of exactly what image backups are for.
Let's read an example question. "If I wanna restore an image
backup from a previous computer complete with it's operating
system onto another computer with a different operating
system, will the operating system on the backup be allowed
to install and override the operating system on the other
computer? If so, how do I get around this?" So, to be clear,
this isn't a matter of allowing anything. This isn't a matter
of one backup or one system allowing something to happen on
the other. You can absolutely restore an image taken on one
machine to another. There's no allowing it to happen. It
overwrites everything that's on the destination machine, on
that new machine. It's all gone. It's replaced by whatever
is in that backup image. Here's the problem. Probably won't
work. That is because this is not what backup images are for.
Let's be clear. Backing up is about saving yourself from
problems. It's about being able to recover when you delete a
file. It's about being able to restore your machine to a known
state if you happen to get malware. It's about knowing
that you can replace a hard drive and carry on in case a
hard drive fails. It is not intended as some kind of a
shortcut for moving from one machine to another. That's not
how it works. That's not what it's for. It's a safety net.
Not an optimization for moving. Here's the problem. When you
setup Windows, when you install Windows on a machine, it
configures itself for that machine. By that, I mean, it
sets settings, it installs drivers, it includes all sorts
of information that is specific to the hardware on that
machine. If you then take that backup image which contains all
of those machine specific settings and take it to another
machine. And restore it. All of those machine specific settings
are going to be wrong because the hardware on the new machine
is completely different than it was on the old machine and
doesn't match what's inside of the backup. When that happens,
when you do that, Windows will try really really hard. God
bless it. It will. It really tries hard to work. There are,
I'll call them three possible outcomes. One is it'll fail. It
just won't work. The machine won't boot. The machine just so
dramatically different from one another that Windows just
doesn't stand a chance. It's just not going to work. Another
alternative is that it'll kinda work mostly but it'll be
unstable and problems are gonna become apparent pretty quick
and programs won't run and it'll complain about hardware
There will be error messages that you can't explain. In
other words, again, Windows will try and it'll actually
start running but there will be many, many problems because of
the differences in hardware. The third scenario is actually
the scarier one to me. Because in the first two scenarios,
it's obvious. Things aren't working or things aren't
working right. The third scenario is where you restore
your image backup to this new machine. You boot it up and it
kinda sort of looks like it worked, right? You still don't
know. It may not actually be touching software or hardware
that is actually fundamentally broken because you're not using
it in the same way or you're doing something different or
you just haven't gotten around to exercising that particular
piece of the machine's capabilities. So, a day, a
week, a month, or two later, you suddenly realize that oh,
this X doesn't work and I have no way to fix it and it doesn't
work because the image that I restored to this machine never
had support for that because it wasn't part of the first
machine. So, you're still left with a fundamentally incomplete
system that hasn't been properly setup for the hardware
that you're on. Again, that's not what image backups are for.
Now, I do have to be honest. Sometimes, there are scenarios
where it can work. What has to happen for it to work is that
the motherboard between the two machines needs to be similar.
What does it mean to be similar? I can't tell you
because we don't know what the differences are that are going
to matter to Windows. The more similar they are, the better.
Identical is best, of course, but we know that that's not
always an option. For individual devices that may be
connected to that system, the same thing applies. The more
similar the devices are between old and new, the better the
chances of things working. How similar? Again, we have no way
to really know and of course, individual devices that are
attached to the system need to be optional because if this
optional device stops working, well, you're at least still
running Windows. But if the device is required like it's
the hard disk or the CPU or the RAM or something that's on the
motherboard, it's not optional. It's gotta work or your system
won't work. Where this actually does play out is when large
companies buy dozens if not hundreds of identical machines.
Then, absolutely, an image backup from one machine can
then get replicated out to all these hundreds of other
machines and they get, they boot up and they're
pre-installed and preconfigured and everything is ready to go.
In reality, they tend to use more dedicated tools for that
kind of thing but in theory, they could do a Exactly the
same thing with an image backup because the machines are all
identical but it's that identicalness that they can
count on and it's that identicalness that you very
likely don't have. So, what should you do instead? What you
might expect? When you get a new machine, install Windows
from scratch if it didn't already come with Windows
installed from scratch. Install your applications from scratch
so that they'll be set up properly. Restore your data. This is
where your image backup can come in handy because your
image backup by definition has everything on it. Everything
including your data. So, you know that you didn't forget a
file, you just need to copy it from the image backup wherever
it may be located within that image. You're not restoring the
entire image, you're just restoring the individual files,
folders, and data that you care about. That's platform
independent and would then work with the software that you've
installed on the operating system. You install. Now, the
other thing is that there are tools that try to solve this
problem. There have been for basically as long as Windows
has been changing revisions, people have been writing tools
that try to solve this very problem. I've used them. I
actually restored a copy of Windows Vista from the machine
of a friend of mine into a virtual machine of my own. This
allowed me to confirm that things were working or recover
files or understand settings or do various things with that
machine in the virtual machine environment - which by definition
is dramatically different. Then the original piece of hardware
that the operating system came from. I used a tool called
redeploy which is a feature of Macrium Reflect's paid edition I
believe it is and it kinda sort of worked. Was not 100%
successful and there in lies my concern. There are going to be
things that aren't going to work. You can spend an awful
lot of time with a partially working system that just
frustrates you or you keep trying to find solutions for
problems that result as part of the migration. Why spend all
that time? Why deal with potentially the extra expense
of another tool? Why not do the right thing? The right thing of
course is to reinstall Windows from scratch on your new
hardware so that it can configure itself for the
specifics of that machine and work reliably. Certainly, more
reliably than I would trust any approach of actually moving an
image backup from one machine to another. I hope that was
helpful. I hope that clarifies why this is such an issue. It's
not something that I would take on lightly for sure. If it all
possible reinstall windows and move forward from there. For
updates, for related links, for comments, and more, visit
askleo.com/4751. I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.