Acronis Universal Restore - Do I really need it ?
Hello New user of Acronis products, recently bought/installed Acronis CyberProtect Home Office(2021 Build 39703) and have configured backups on external drive. Current system is Dell Precision Tower(Intel core-i9,PCI NVMe SSD,UEFI Secure Boot,Win10 Pro, x64). Have created Acronis Rescue Media Builder(WinPE,64bit,Windows 8/8.1/10/11(Windows ADK) on a USB flash drive, with auto-detected Display drivers. No other drivers loaded.Boot from it and I can view the Acronis Backups on the external drive fine. No attempt to restore, as system works fine. Acronis Universal Restore - I understand this is required, to make the restored system bootable ,if I were to restore the backup to a dis-similiar hardware or clone across dissimilar hardware systems. I'd like to know what constitutes a dissimiliar hardware from Acronis Backup/Recovery perspective? ( Different Processor(eg Intel vs AMD)? Different boot mode(UEFI vs legacy BIOS)?, different boot disk architecture? etc) If I were to stick to the similar hardware architecture(say Dell Precision Tower series with Intel chipset, PCI NVMe SSD Boot disk/UEFI boot/64 bit) and Windows(10 or 11), do I really need Acronis Universal restore to make the system bootable, after restore/recovery from Acronis Backups? Reason I'm asking is, multiple attempts to create a bootable Acronis Universal Restore media on a different USB flash drives has failed. I mean, the creation of the media itself(either WinPE or WinRE) goes through fine, but is not getting recognized when booting(even if I were to disable UEFI/Secure boot and switch to Legacy BIOS boot mode). Simply reports "No Boot device found.Press any key to continue" error, if I select this USB device in the boot sequence. Have tried multiple USB drives(flash,SSD) for this restore media - same result. I dont want to invest further time&effort in creating the bootable Universal restore media, if I dont need it. can you pls advise, Thanks much!
AUR is only really needed when there are significant differences in hardware between the source system where a backup has been created from, and a target system where the backup image has been restored to, but which doesn't boot correctly due to missing or incorrect device drivers.
What AUR is doing in reality is doing a SysPrep of the restored OS on the target PC by replacing specific device drivers for generic versions of the same for known hardware, and offering prompts for any other device drivers that might be required for new hardware detected that wasn't present in the original system.
When any new hardware has been identified, you could then add drivers for the same to the AUR media and run the tool again to install those drivers, then repeat and test etc.
Unless you are actually going to perform the above type of migration, then there is no need to create the AUR media.
One note about USB media, it is best to keep this to a minimum of around 2GB media size and no larger than 32GB size - this is primarily due to restrictions imposed by Microsoft not Acronis. I typically use 16GB or smaller USB media. It has to be formatted as FAT32 so is a waste to use much larger sizes.
One further note, any change in hardware will bring along activation challenges, for Windows and other Microsoft software such as Office, and for other commercial applications which base their activation on hardware signatures.
Thank you Steve, for the detailed response, very helpful.
I'm trying to nail down what constitutes "dis-similiar" hardware , that'll require AUR. eg different Processor(eg Intel vs AMD)? Different boot mode(UEFI vs legacy BIOS)?, different boot disk architecture? etc) . From your experience, what kinda scenarios that has prompted the need for AUR.
It looks like If I were to stick to similar hardware architecture(say Dell Precision Tower series with Intel chipset, PCI NVMe SSD Boot disk/UEFI boot/64 bit) and Windows(10 or 11), then I can most probably skip AUR and just restore the Acronis backup to new system and move forward(taking care of licensing etc).
Yes I had been trying 32GB USB flash drives, with GPT/FAT32.
Also from what you're saying, if there are some specific drivers that comes bundled with the new system, I can copy them to the AUR media and re-deploy as part of the process?
Thanks again
Dissimilar hardware can occur with different builds of the same make / model of system when the maker users a range of components according to what was available when the build occurred.
With Windows 10 & 11, the need for using AUR has greatly reduced, especially when replacing like for like.
The last time I used AUR personally was when migrating a physical system to a virtual machine running either on VMware or Hyper-V (can't remember which one!).
Older versions of Windows below 10 were more likely to require AUR.
If you change processor architecture from Intel to AMD etc then again you are more likely to need to use AUR to help with managing additional device drivers that may be needed.
Our normal advice for most migrations involving Windows 10 or higher would be to use Backup & Recovery to migrate the OS from the source to the target system, then try booting the restored target system 'as is' and see if it throws any errors or not? If all is good then AUR isn't needed but if there are errors or a BSOD etc, shutdown, and boot the system from basic AUR media and let it advise you on what device drivers are needed, then recreate the AUR media with those further drivers and test again.
Note: one word of caution: do not attempt to inject the whole contents of the drivers folder from the system where AUR is being created - it will fail and complicate matters greatly!
Thanks again. Will skip AUR for now..