Basics: True Image vs Universal Restore
We got the cloud service because I had assumed when you back up to the cloud, the advantages of that are that if your computer crashes, you can buy a new computer, sign into Arconis, then system restore using the image on the cloud.
But now I'm realizing the back up is only good on the same computer?
And if my computer harddrive failed and I wanted to move that image over, I couldn't, unless I went out and bought a removable USB and did a universal restore?
Thanks for explanation.
Elizabeth, any backup strategy should have more than one option to be effective, so you shouldn't be relying on backing up to the Acronis Cloud (or any other service) on its own.
See Acronis article on The Ultimate Guide to Computer Backup for information on 3-2-1 backup strategy!
The most likely failure scenario for most computers is going to be a disk drive failure rather than a total system failure, so being able to recover to a new / replacement drive should be the first objective before any concern about recovering to a totally new system with all the extra considerations that come with doing so.
Agree with Steve! No backup scheme is 100%.
That said, if you are cloning one system to another, or taking a backup of one and planning to restore to another, there are a lot of other considerations as well. It should be possible, but really depends...
1) Does the new system have the same OS and license?
You can't take a Windows 7 OEM licensed OS and just dump it on an a different OEM computer that came with Windows 10 OEM license
Assuming the new system came with a similar OEM license (like for like), you still need to activate the original OEM license at least once to make sure it's registered with Microsoft. The hardware check is what Microsoft uses now to reactivate a reinstall.
2) Are the old and new system booting the OS the same way? Are they both legacy/MBR or both UEFI/GPT OS installs? If they are different, you can convert an older legacy OS install to a UEFI install during the restore and make it bootable, but you can't go backwards
Additionally, the new PC bios settings may need to be changed to allow booting afterwards. Some bios are locked and won't allow legacy/MBR.
Ultimately, as long as you have a full backup, you should have options for restoring, but may take some trial and error. When restoring to a completely new computer though, you're going to have different challenges than restoring to the original computer because of Microsoft licensing requirements and variations in motherboard bios capabilities.
in the meantime, make sure you are also taking local backups. That will give you more recovery options and they are much faster to take and to restore! I would consider a local backup as the primary means and an offsite/cloud backup as your secondary option, in case the 1st fails.