Acronis Universal Restore - REAL LIFE STORY...NEVER WORKED

I wish I could have found a post like this before heading down the road of attempting to use Universal Restore, so I'm writing for the benefit of others.

I have a new computer using Windows 8.1 that must go to the shop for service. My thought was to use Universal Restore to move my image to my old computer that runs Windows 7. I had a second internal drive in the old machine and planned to boot to that drive using the 8.1 backup image...keep working on that image while the machine was out for service...restore the image back to the original machine when it comes back.

After countless hours of personal time plus time with Acronis support, it never worked. One limitation that I learned about is that you must have the drivers for the hardware you're migrating to in the version of the target machine. So, my 8.1 image could not be restored to a machine that only has drivers available up to Windows 7. Plus, identifying the exact drivers that you'll need is complex and time consuming. Acronis will tell you to get them from the computer manufacturer, but drivers are often distributed in .exe installation programs. You have to get all of the needed drivers into one or more directories that the Universal Restore program can be pointed to (and technical support said it doesn't search subdirectories, so files must be copied to one place or multiple folder references must be added during the restore process).

Finally, I will warn anyone attempting this that the online documentation is terribly inadequate. The process looked simple when I read the KB article and looked at the YouTube video, but after 10+ hours trying to get the backup to boot successfully on the target machine (never did), I dread the possibility of how much time it might take to go back the other direction when my machine comes back from service.

FYI, I also researched and tried using the Acronis backup in VHD format with various virtual machine programs and was ultimately able to get the backup to run in VMware player after using their backup/conversion program, but there wasn't a simple path back to a regular image when my repaired machine comes back. Disadvantages of VM also include having to split/share your computer's resources (memory, disk drives, etc).

In conclusion, I had thought that Universal Restore and virtual machines had advanced to the point that it wouldn't be too difficult to temporarily transfer a running disk image from one machine to another and back. At this point, I found that wasn't true short of using virtual machines and dealing with their hardware sharing limitations.