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I've a PC at work that has windows 10 Professional, and we're thinking about upgrading to Windows 11 Professional.

We use Aomei Backup for making periodic images of our disks.

I'd like to try Windows 11 in order to check if we have no problems with our custom applications, so the plan is to:

  1. Make an image of the PC with Aomei Backup
  2. Go with the upgrade
  3. Check if everything is ok with our application and
    1. If everything is ok, start the migration
    2. If we have some problem, revert the pc with the image backup in order to reset everything and return to win 10.

My question is about the license: if I upgrade my windows installation from 10 to 11, if I revert the disk image in order to return to win 10, the license will be always valid, or I'll need to buy another license for windows 10 since the existing one was upgraded?

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  • It depends on info not supplied in the question - If the PC shipped with Win 10 Pro from an OEM, there will never be an issue since the key would be stored within the UEFI firmware. Is this PC and others registered with an online Microsoft account? If so, there won't be an issue since the key is already attached to the motherboard's hardware ID and stored under the online Microsoft account (if choosing to downgrade via an image backup, it'll still register as activated, and will stay that way once Windows Update is run - Windows Update is how activation is automatically done on Win10+).
    – JW0914
    Commented Aug 2, 2023 at 13:13

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If the license key is a digital license (and this means that it is stored in the BIOS) it'll be fine as Windows 10 would check the stored license key, and would proceed with the activation in the absence of any discrepancy.

This is a portion of a Microsoft Answers' post:

As long as Windows 10 has been previously installed and activated any subsequent installation matching the earlier installation should automatically activate.

If you have changed the motherboard and the original installation was an OEM copy of Windows you will need to buy a new copy of Windows. If you have changed one or more other hardware devices the new installation may not automatically activate.

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