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Confidence booster - virtual machine success

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I tried an experiment this weekend which has really boosted my confidence in ATI.

I set up a Win 10 virtual machine in Oracle's free VirtualBox software (BIOS mode). I then mounted the recovery ISO in the virtual DVD and booted the VM, restored the boot drive image from my NAS with all default settings, and then booted the virtual machine. Amazingly, the system booted perfectly. It took a few extra minutes to discover "devices" since it's now running in the VM, but after that it came right up to the login screen. No issues whatsoever. I didn't even need to run Universal Restore as apparently Win 10 does a good job figuring out device changes on its own.

This really gives me confidence that restoration will not be an issue. Worst case I can stand up a working copy of my computer inside 45 minutes on a VM on another system. The whole complex structure of the boot drive with MBR, system partitions etc., was perfectly replicated in the VM.

This ease of restoration from a single TIB file is actually a big advantage for ATI in my view. I've used some competing products which are in some ways more stable from a UI perspective, but which require significant knowledge of the disk layout in order to restore each partition. ATIs abstraction of this (while still providing manual options) is a big plus.

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Thanks for the positive feedback with ease of use in this situation.  I fully agree that Acronis does this very well with VM's (especially with Win10 which is much better at dealing with different SATA modes and/or driver differences between systems).  I use VMWare workstation and do the same regularly.  Of course, it varies from system to system... especially if the original OS image is being pushed to a VM on different hardware and whether or not the VM install method (legacy or UEFI) is setup correctly first.  All-in-all though, once you have the back end bios settings configured, this is a very nice method to use and usually works quite well.  MBR/legacy seems to keep this especially simple.  I'm finding that UEFI behavior across different motherboards and/or even bios versions on some motherboards can cause a completel different story as UEFI settings/configuratoins don't seem to be standarized like legacy/MBR was, but now that I kno whow to repair booloaders (bootrec /fixboot, etc), it's not as bad either. 

My Gigabyte bios is garbage though.  I basically have to rest the CMOS via shorting the jumper almost anytime I make a hard drive change.  It's taken me close to a year to figure this out as the behavior has been so sporadic and different after different clone and/ore recovery procedures with Acronis and a few other backup products for testing.