Hi everyone-
I was curious – are the image backups that UrBackup takes hardware independent? Meaning they can be restored to dissimiliar hardware? Or can they only be restored to identical hardware?
Thank you.
It’s an exact copy of the data on the imaged disks. If you can take the disk drive to another computer and it works, then restoring works the same way. It’s not locked to a certain serial number, but no changes are made to allow installing the image on different equipment. The only option is to install to a larger target disk in case that old 127GB drive crashes and you can only find a 256GB disk.
Will images restore on completely different hardware? Say… a motherboard on a server dies – can an image be restored on completely different hardware assuming the disk size is the same or bigger?
I’m trying to determine if device drivers would be an issue.
To some extent the answer depends on the version of Windows you’re restoring, later Windows versions are more forgiving than earlier ones in that respect, there is a risk Windows won’t be able to sort out drivers for the new hardware when it boots, or that it may fail to boot, but for say Win 10 the risk is far less than it was with XP/Vista/7 at least you won’t be getting “Wrong HAL” BSODs with 10 (or equivalent server versions).
There’s always the option of mounting the .vhd prior to restoring, loading the registry hives contained in it and making the changes required if such a restore fails, it’s a little involved, but doable if you research the changes you need to make.