Acronis Universal Restore on Windows and its Alternatives

Why Do We Need Universal Restore?

With Universal Restore technology, you can restore the system to any new available machine, regardless of the platform! It also enables you to restore an operating system (OS) to a computer with different hardware. This means you can quickly recover your OS in the event of hardware failure and deploy the same OS on different computers. Moreover, it can be utilized for physical-to-virtual or virtual-to-physical migrations as well.

Universal Restore works behind the scenes to disassociate the backup data from hardware dependencies, while still retaining all necessary system data, including the OS, files, settings, apps, and so on.

What Is Acronis Universal Restore?

Acronis Universal Restore is a feature of Acronis True Image, which is now known as Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. It is a utility designed to facilitate the booting of an operating system on either a physical or virtual machine. This tool ensures the detection and installation of necessary drivers for OS startup, such as storage controllers, chipsets, or motherboards.

It allows computer users to make the old system bootable on new hardware and lets you restore your system image to different hardware environments. Besides, Acronis Universal Restore also allows changing Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer and installing the HDD controller and NIC drivers.

The Acronis Universal Restore tool comes in handy in the following scenarios:

• Instant recovery of the failed system on different hardware. • Hardware-independent cloning and OS deployment. • Physical-to-virtual or virtual-to-physical computer migration for system recovery, testing, and other purposes.

Acronis is a practical backup and recovery software with many features, but is Acronis True Image free? You can find the answer in this article.

Is Acronis True Image Free?

Acronis True Image is a practical tool for backing up data on your computer. But is Acronis True Image free? This article will explain whether Acronis True Image is a paid or free software.

How to Restore System Image to dissimilar hardware with Acronis Universal Restore

Acronis Universal Restore works great for restoring a system to new hardware in Windows.

Step-by-Step Guide: Restore System Image to Dissimilar Hardware

The detailed steps for restoring a system image to a new disk with Acronis Universal Restore are as follows:

Step 1. Verify the backups that you want to restore.

Note: You can validate your system backup using Acronis True Image in Windows: click on the arrow icon next to the backup you want to validate, and then click Validate all versions.

Step 2. Install the necessary drivers for your new hardware.

Step 3. Create the Acronis Bootable Media and then set the BIOS boot order to make your bootable media the first boot device.

Note: You need to download Acronis Universal Restore Media Builder within Acronis Universal Restore at this stage.

Step 4. Start the target computer from the Acronis bootable media.

Step 5. Boot from the bootable media and select Acronis True Image.

Step 6. On the Home screen, select My Disks under Recover.

Step 7. Select the system disk or partition backup to use for recovery. If the backup is not displayed, click Browse and manually specify the backup location.

Step 8. If you have a hidden partition, click Details on the wizard's toolbar.

Step 9. Choose Recover whole disks and partitions at the Recovery method step.

Step 10. Under What to recover, select the boxes for the partitions you want to restore.

Step 11. Specify the settings on the Options of the hidden partition (also named Options of Partition 1-1).

Step 12. On the settings for Partition C, specify the settings for the second partition.

Step 13. Carefully read the summary of all the operations to be performed, then click Proceed.

Disadvantages of Acronis Universal Restore

However, Acronis Universal Restore has disadvantages, despite being a good tool for restoring a system image to a new disk.

• This option is not available when the image being recovered is located in the Acronis Secure Zone or when using Acronis Active Restore.
• It does not support or install plug-and-play drivers.

Is There Any Better Universal Restore Software Than Acronis?

In this case, if you're looking for a better and easier way to migrate system to new hardware, you can try a backup utility called Todo Backup Home.

Todo Backup is a versatile backup software tool. It's more user-friendly than Acronis Universal Restore when it comes to restoring a system image to new hardware. It's compatible with Windows 11, 10, 8.1, 8, 7, XP, and Vista. It enables you to automatically create a system backup and restore from this backup. You can use it to back up various file types and different types of backups. Most importantly, it provides 250GB of free cloud storage. With this tool, you can:

• Store backups in various locations, such as local drives, security zones, NAS devices, and the cloud.
• Create full, incremental, and differential backups.
• Easily recover your different backups.

The steps to back up the system to a disk are as follows:

Step 1. Launch Todo Backup on your computer, and click Create Backup on the home screen. Then, click the big question mark to select backup contents.

Step 2. Click "OS" to start backing up your Windows operating system.

Step 3. Your Windows operating system information and all system-related files and partitions will be selected automatically, so there's no need to make any manual selections here. Next, click on the highlighted area to choose where to save your system image backup.

System Backup

Step 4. The backup location can be another local drive on your computer, an external hard drive, network, cloud, or NAS. Generally, we recommend using an external physical drive or cloud to store system backup files.

Step 5. If interested, you can customize settings such as enabling an automatic backup schedule on a daily, weekly, monthly, or event-based basis, and creating differential and incremental backups by clicking Options. Then, click "Backup Now" to start the Windows system backup process. The completed backup task will be displayed on the left side in a card format.

Here are the steps to restore a system image to new hardware.

* To perform system recovery on a non-bootable machine, try to boot the computer with the Todo Backup emergency disk.

Step 1. Launch Todo Backup, and click "Browse to Recover".

Step 2. Navigate to your backup destination and select the system backup file you need. (The backup file created by Todo Backup tool is a .pbd file.)

Step 3. Select the recovery disk. Make sure that the partition style of the source disk and the recovery disk are the same.

Step 4. You can customize the disk layout as needed, then click "Proceed" to start system backup restoration.

Conclusion

Both Acronis Universal Restore and Todo Backup Home are great tools for system migration to a new disk from an image. However, Todo Backup Home is more recommended since it has fewer limitations and more features compared with Acronis Universal Restore.

Todo Backup Home provides you an easy way to perform system image recovery. Moreover, this powerful backup tool enables you to complete various tasks. For instance, it also allows you to back up files in safe mode and back up SSD to image.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Acronis Instant Restore?

With Acronis Instant Restore, you can boot a copy of your system on an existing Microsoft Hyper-V directly from backup storage without moving the data. Since there's no need to move the data, RTOs are reduced to a stunning 10-15 seconds.

2. Can Acronis recover deleted files?

When you back up a device with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, you can back up all of your data on the computer, including multiple versions of a particular file. A straightforward search and restore process means you can quickly and easily recover that deleted file.

3. How do I read Acronis backup files?

You can view the available backup versions, corresponding to the number of times the backup job has run, under the Recovery tab in Acronis True Image. Select the backup you want to check the recovery points for, and then click the Recovery tab at the top.

4. Is Acronis backup bootable?

You can create rescue bootable media. It's a standalone version of Acronis True Image. You can use it to boot up a crashed machine or a machine without an operating system and restore an image of your system.