old laptop to new laptop with different hardware

Mike, welcome to these public User Forums.

Please see KB 19296: Acronis products cannot be used to transfer applications to different system or upgrade OS - which gives the official statement from Acronis.

Even though you may have applications installed on a different disk partition, there are elements of those applications that are stored in the Windows Registry or other system folders on the main OS partition. 

If you just restore the second partition contents, this will be fine for any user data (documents, images, music etc) but you would still need to re-install any applications in order to re-establish the correct registry entries etc.

Steve,

Thanks of answering, though not the answer I was hoping for.  

I have alot of licensed programs and lots of files stored on the 500 gB SSD hard drive on the old computer.  I have on a separate USB drive a current image.  The new computer will have a 1tB SSD hard drive partitioned in two.  The new computer will have Windows 10 loaded, but will be a more current version with all the new drivers.   Several questions arise:

1. I would like to load the programs without having to find all the license keys.  I am guessing from your answer this is not possible.  Bummer.

2.  The Acronis Image of the old computer includes user files.  How do I separate and load the user files from the image to the new computer?  

Thanks

Mike

Mike, the answer to your questions have to start with 'it depends!'...

For license keys / activation - that really does depend on the software as to whether you can sign in with a user account and credentials or whether you will need to enter your license key or serial number etc.  Even then, it depends further on how it is licensed, i.e. to one specific computer via its hardware signature, or can be transferred to another etc.

You may need to contact the software vendor to advise them of the background to why you are needing to move your license to a different hardware box, i.e. the old one didn't survive hitting the pavement..!

For the user data, then this will depend on how it was organised on the old computer but with ATI 2019 installed on the new computer, and your backup drive connected to it, then you should be able to double-click on the .tib backup file and browse through the folder contents from the old computer.  At that point you can make a decision on whether to do a simple copy & paste of chunks of your user data, or whether to launch the full ATI GUI and perform a recovery of your Files & Folders from your Disk backup image.

I would caution against restoring any folders directly to the original locations on the new computer, but would suggest taking this opportunity to consider how your data could be best organised?  At a minimum, restore folders to a temporary location on your new second partition.

I recently bought a new HP Omen laptop to replace an aging Dell one, where the new laptop came with a nice fast 128GB SSD plus a large 1TB HDD drive, so I was faced with making similar decisions, as my old Dell laptop just had a single 1TB HDD drive with multiple partitions.

I decided to keep my 128GB SSD for only the Win 10 OS and applications with all my user data (documents, photos, music, videos, storage folders etc) all housed on the 1TB HDD drive.

This is partially in keeping with how the Dell was organised, except that was all on the same physical drive using partitions.

I haven't used the default 'My Documents' or Pictures etc folders which then stores all the data in the C:\Users\Steve\ folders for many years as preferred to have separation between the OS and my data.  This also allows the user data to be backed up completely separately and on a different schedule etc.

One good thing with Windows 10 is that you can right-click on such as Documents in Explorer, select Properties then open the Location tab and set where you want this to be.  And do the same for Music, Pictures, Videos etc.

Steve,

Thanks.  That is a lot to chew on.  I have time to chew, as my new laptop won't be in for another five days.

Question:  Do you like keeping the OS separate from data files?  I too maintain a C:\Users\Mike\folders system.  A subfolder to the . . .\Mike\ is AppData, which contains settings for my more intense programs like AutoCad, which has loads of settings for these programs.  How do I best use ATI to migrate these files to a useful state.

I guess one of the first programs I would need to load would be ATI, is that correct?

Mike, I do not touch the AppData folder structure and would not advise restoring any of its contents from a backup from a different computer, as you are likely to break something in the process unless 100% sure of exactly what you are doing!

In all honesty, I stopped using C:\Users\<name>\ Documents, Pictures, Music, Downloads etc a long time ago in favour of keeping better separation from the OS, preferably on a separate partition or drive.  This means that I can recover by OS partition without having to worry about whether I am restoring old documents I had deleted since the backup or else would be losing other documents that had been created.

I also take the same approach with my email client storage folder, keeping this away from the OS partition too.  I use Mozilla Thunderbrid for email and it is a fairly simple process to do this.

With regard to individual application settings, then it is unlikely that any license type information would be held in the AppData folders - this is more likely to be in the Windows Registry or in some other hidden / system location and probably encrypted. 

It may be possible to restore some individual application settings folders to AppData but this needs to be done very carefully, and you should make a backup or copy of the current data in such folders before making any changes!

See KB 61162: Acronis True Image 2019: "You've exceeded the maximum number of activations for this serial number" for details of how to migrate your license to the new laptop.