Skip to main content

New Laptop and Transferring all

Thread needs solution

I've had Acronis for years (2017 version) but just bought a new laptop & need to transfer everything over. So newbie here. Lot's of questions. It is just as easy as signing into my account via online and choosing "downloads- bootable media"?  What if I'm going from Windows 10 to Windows 11? Any issues I need to be aware of? Will I be able to not select transferring the OS? What is the difference between bootable media and a universal restore? I just want to make sure I do it correctly. Will I have to install Acronis on the new laptop or is access via online sufficient? Any help is appreciated.

1 Users found this helpful

Michelle, welcome to these public User Forums.

Some comments / answers to your questions:

ATI 2017 is now at least 6 years old and lacks support for some new hardware that you may have in your new 2023 laptop, i.e. such as NVMe M.2 SSD drives.  This will impact most when wanting to create and use Acronis bootable rescue media because ATI 2017 defaults to using Linux based media which has multiple known limitations and would need Windows PE type rescue media to be created to overcome these.

You can transfer your license for ATI 2017 across from your old PC to the new laptop which is fairly straight-forward.  See KB 58546: Acronis True Image 2017: Activating Full Version and KB 58554: Acronis True Image 2017: "You've exceeded the maximum number of activations for this serial number" which should help you.

Any attempt to transfer only your installed programs and data will not work - you would have to transfer everything or only your data (documents, photos, music, videos etc).

Please see KB 19296: Acronis products cannot be used to transfer applications to different system or upgrade OS

Universal Restore is a tool that is intended to help with transferring a complete Windows OS system from one PC to a different PC with new hardware.

See KB 65413: Acronis True Image 2021: Restoring to dissimilar hardware with Acronis Universal Restore and in particular review Steps 4 and 5 of this document.

Also KB 2149: Acronis Universal Restore

KB 36187: Windows activation required after restore with Acronis Universal Restore, cloning or converting backup to virtual machine

KB 45432: Acronis Software: Troubleshooting Universal Restore and Bootability Issues

KB 46405: Acronis True Image: Restored Operating System Fails to Boot

My personal advice to you would be to only transfer your user data across to the new laptop, especially if it comes with Windows 11, then re-install any programs that you want to use on that new laptop.

The benefit of doing this are that the laptop will perform much faster / better without all the years of accumulated 'dross' from the years of use the old PC has been through, it will already have all the required device drivers needed for the new hardware it contains, and may allow you to install much newer versions of the programs you want to use.

Thank you so much Steve. I also have Carbonite. I'm assuming the philosophy is the same and to transfer data only if I can't get Acronis to work?  Also, if I transfer the license to the new laptop, I'm assuming I lose access on the old PC? So data will have to come from the online download on the new laptop? Thanks again for the help.

If you did transfer over everything from the old to the new laptop, then you are still likely to encounter licensing issues for any applications that bases their activation on the hardware signature of the device it is installed on, i.e. Windows, MS Office and Acronis do this.

If you have data stored in the Acronis Cloud servers, then you can access it from any PC using a web browser if you sign in using your Acronis account credentials but if you want to work within the Acronis 2017 application with that data, then you would need a license for each PC unless you create and use Acronis bootable rescue media for the one without a license.