Hi i would like to know if urbackup can clone boot partitions of windows 10 and or 11 so that it clonable to a differen PC hardware.
Acronis have nice feature, but i more and more dont like how Acronis doing stuff , so here we are.
Microsoft would be very pissed off if UrBackup did this. They spend a lot of their time making sure that you cannot do this.
Even in the old days - around Windows 2000 and before Microsoft came up with their “activation scheme” - it was a pain to move a Windows installation from one partition to another partition on the same computer. You usually had to manually edit the boot.ini file and do some other stuff manually. Acronis and Norton tried to do this for you in their TrueImage and Ghost programs, but often times they failed. An extremely common complaint back in those days was “The backup appeared to work fine, but when I restored the computer wouldn’t boot.”
Besides Microsoft intentionally throwing roadblocks in your way to prevent this kind of cloning, there is also the issue that Windows detects hardware at install time. So it doesn’t respond well to changing the hardware out from under it (what effectively happens when you clone an image to a different piece of hardware).
If you want to do this type of cloning frequently, abandon Windows and move to Linux. Linux detects hardware at boot time, and it’s trivial to pick up a Linux image and move it to a totally different computer and have it work the first try. The process is “unplug the harddrive from the old computer and plug it into the new computer, then boot.” Or you can do this with a DVD, or a thumbdrive.
I would be surprosed - really, really, really surprised - if a UrBackup Windows image would work on different hardware. Microsoft DOES NOT want this to happen. They want you to buy a new copy of Windows. Of course you can move user data between computers, facilitated by UrBackup or not, but not the Windows OS itself.
I am not affiliate with Acronis, but it works, you just buy a license windows key and later install it and that’s it.
Actually you can clone without Acronis and still it would work, in such cases i use special commercial tool for windows repair, which rewrite the registry and rebuild UEFI bootloader from “live cd disk”.
Anyways, it is good to know what to expect from urbackup.
I have seen the client , looks like very basic, but if it can clone whole system disk with all partitions , well that’s fine by me, server setup is actually good work and i have hardware for it, i just hope that my backup always and always would be rollable.
I use Clonezilla for such things.
So finally i decided to full integration with urbackup.
I just hope my disk wont fail and i would always be able to recover from backups which makes urbackup.
I will write a blog about.
My backup strategy will be to full backup disk c: each 2 weeks.