Restoring an Image to Make a Second Laptop Equal to the First

Randy, welcome to these user forums.

You face several challenges in doing what you are asking regardless of the two Surface Book Pro laptops having identical hardware.

The first challenge is that in order to restore your backup from your first SBP laptop you need to boot the second laptop using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media and this further needs to see and recognise both the internal disk drive and an external disk drive holding the backup image to be restored.

There have been a number of posts from other users struggling to boot the Acronis Rescue Media on SBP computers and failing to recogonise drives - and the answer to these posts has been that you need to create and use the alternative Windows PE Rescue Media and inject into this media additional device drivers, in particular to support Intel RST for RAID support that is commonly used as the disk controller mode, even with a single drive installed.

You may also need to have a USB docking station or similar in order to provide the number of USB ports needed for this type of restore using the Rescue Media, including ports for connecting an external USB keyboard and mouse.

The second challenge is that technically you are restoring to different hardware and therefore you may also need to create the Acronis Universal Restore media if there are any differences in the hardware that require the restored OS to be prepared to work with the new hardware.  If the two laptops are identical in hardware components, then this may not be needed but best to be forewarned in case it is.

Fortunately, both your laptops are using Windows 10 which makes life easier in terms of Windows activation, as this is based on hardware signature so once you restore the backup from laptop 1 to laptop 2, that second laptop should be able to reactivate Windows based on its own prior activation on that same hardware.

Final comment, there is no need to do a sector-by-sector backup on your fully loaded laptop - this should only be necessary when you have an unsupported OS installed on a partition, i.e. a linux distribution.

Thank you Steve for your detailed answer. I'm a little confused though, so maybe you can give me some insight. The whole point of me buying Acronis was the hope that I could easily do image backups and restores, and Acronis promoted itself as being able to do this. If doing an image restore is so problematic and iffy, what's the point of using Acronis? I'm trying to avoid the very time consuming process of reinstalling all my software, files and settings etc., so that my second machine ends up being, more or less, like the first. I can always do this the hard way I suppose, but I was hoping Acronis would make this much simpler.

Randy, Acronis can do what you want but this doesn't mean that this will be over simple.  

The main purpose of the software is to protect your investment by providing a comprehensive suite of backup operations and the ability to do different types of recovery of your data.

Backup and Restores to the same computer are relatively straight-forward but this is complicated on some computer models due to the hardware used and how this is configured to work.

Your Surface Book Pro is most likely included in the above statement - I do not have one of these computers so cannot speak from personal experience here, just my experience in dealing with other users in these forums where the standard Linux based Acronis Rescue Media does not work on these types of computers - this is partially because they are Microsoft machines and MS doesn't like you to use Linux OS distributions, but also because the Linux Rescue media does not provide support for RAID disk controllers configurations which is more commonly used in modern systems using NVMe disk drives, hence why you will most probably need to create the Windows PE version of the Rescue Media.

Once you get the Rescue Media working for your Surface Book Pro, then the actual process of Restoring the backup from the first SBP laptop should be relatively easy.

Randy build WinPE Rescue media using our MVP tool - this will build WinPE rescue media and automatically inject the IRST drivers for the RAID enabled NVME PCIE drive in the Surface Pro 4.  You'll need to download and install the Windows 10 ADK seperately (link below - 1511 or 1607 will work - either is fine).  Install it with the top 3 options (3.4Gb in total).  

Essentially, all of the backup products out there use ADK to create WinPE, although some automate this process already.  Acronis is different in that it uses Linux by default since it's open source and can provide a pre-built fully functional recovery media.  Unfortunately, the SP4 is stricly Windows so the WinPE method is specifically needed for this hardware.  Acronis will build WinPE as well, but the MVP winpe tool will make you a more thorough winpe with customizations and the drivers already needed for the SP4.

Once you have the WinPE rescue media (I'd recommend a USB flash drive since the SP4 has a usb port and no DVD or CD rom), then test booting it to make sure you can see the internal hard drive with it.  If so, you're good to go after that.

FYI, you don't need to do a sector-by-sector backup - in fact, it's not recommended unless you have a hard drive issue or need a chain of custody which requires you to backup the unused/blank space of the drive.  Sector by sector has no advantage for the actual recovery of the working OS and data.

As for transfering one OS from System A to B - if these are the same hardware and you've registered the Windows 10 license of both already and both are using the same OS type (both home or both pro), you should be able to transfer image A to image B without needing to do anything special.  However, I would recommend you take a full disk backup of each (as a precaution - just in case), before attempting to restore system A to system B.  Always good to have an original image of system B as a fall back point or restore point, in case you need or want to recover back to that point in time.  This is more important these days since OEM's generally don't provide an installer disc.  Not as big a deal if you don't mind installing fresh, and have already created a Windows 10 installer usb using the Microsoft Media creation tool, but if you haven't, that's all the more reason to have a backup of what you have as a precaution.