up vote 4 down vote favorite
1
share [g+] share [fb]

In the spirit of Joel Spolsky's "Let’s stop talking about backups" article, is there any software that's good at restoring a Windows computer?

By "good", I mean it can handle a situation where a laptop is dropped, stolen, flooded, or otherwise completely unusable. I want to be able to take a backup image and restore it on another computer, which may be a completely different make and model, and have the new computer running without having to re-install every application and re-configure every setting.

Obviously, any new device drivers will need to be installed and configured, and Windows itself will need to be reactivated. But is there any software that will do this out of the box with a minimum of typing, scripting, and hoop-jumping?

link|improve this question
Actually, now that I think about it, this software would be far more useful for hardware upgrades than for disaster recovery. I can't count the number of hours spent reinstalling and reconfiguring apps on new hardware. – Mike Hobbs Feb 22 '10 at 20:16
feedback

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

There are some imaging software that can do this. Of the top of my mind comes Shadowprotect with its Bare metal recovery and Acronis Trueimage with Universal restore.

link|improve this answer
Thanks for the lead on on Shadowprotect. The feature list on their website is exactly what I was looking for. I'll have to give their 30-day trial a whirl and report back. – Mike Hobbs Feb 22 '10 at 20:18
1  
* grumble * In order to get a "full" evaluation copy of Shadowprotect that included the recovery CD, I had to fill out a sales form and wait for approval. Otherwise, the product worked as advertised. I took a backup of Windows 7 on an Acer laptop and was able to restore it on a Compaq desktop. The restore for Windows 7 isn't completely seamless yet, due to the janky way that Windows 7 boots from a separate recovery partition. I had to pop in my Windows 7 install CD and run a quick recovery operation, but after that, everything worked fine. – Mike Hobbs Feb 26 '10 at 6:57
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

Clonezilla is a free tool which is really good. Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image are also available.

link|improve this answer
1  
I love clonezilla. I use it all the time for my linux installs. Unfortunately, Windows is far less forgiving about booting a disk image on hardware other than the one it was installed on. – Mike Hobbs Feb 22 '10 at 20:23
feedback
up vote -1 down vote

I don't know whether there's any good answer to your question. I suspect not.

One less-than-perfect option is to convert your physical machine to a virtual machine that can run under something like vmware or virtualbox. It's certainly not a simple backup. But benefit is that you then have a virtual machine that will run anywhere without having to reinstall apps. VMWare's convert app is here: http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ If you've used the vmware converter you can convert to virtualbox with some additional steps: http://www.sysprobs.com/physical-virtual-virtualbox-virtualbox-p2v

Like I said, this isn't complete backup and restore solution. But it might be part of the puzzle for some people. Use your physical machine as you have been, use a converted vm as the backup of system and apps, and use a vanilla backup for documents and data files.

link|improve this answer
Actually, I have given a lot of consideration to just running everything on xen or vmware, with live migrations and whatnot. Unfortunately, graphics card virtualization isn't at acceptable levels yet. – Mike Hobbs Feb 22 '10 at 20:26
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.