Basic Imaging query

I am looking into an imaging solution like Shadowprotect or Acronis and discussed this with a friend. As my technical knowledge is very limited , I was not able to answer some of his questions or address his doubts.

His main issue is that imaging my pc at its current state is fine if I reinstall into the same system. However, he does not understand how it could work if my hardware died and I wanted to use the image to recreate the pc. This would only work if the hardware configuration is identical. If I used my system for a few years, imaged faithfully and then the system died, any new system probably would have different drivers, network cards etc thus causing issues. What can I tell him?

 

ShadowProtect Desktop v3 has HIR = Hardware Independent Restore, which allows you to restore an image on different hardwares. Maybe your friend never heard of HIR. Let him google and read about HIR.
Peter has tested this HIR in practice and he will tell you about it.

 

I thought I might just pop in here (instead of starting a new thread) and report my experience with Shadowprotect HIR.

I bought myself a new motherboard, memory and CPU a couple of days ago.
My previous setup was AMD Athlon 3800 64x2 2GB PC3200 memory and Asrock motherboard.

I wanted to try Intel after using AMD for the last 5 years so I bought Intel Core duo and 2GB 800Mhz memory (I cant believe how cheap memory are nowadays ) and a ASUS motherboard (P5K)
I really didnt want to reinstall everything from scratch, I wanted to keep my Vista and two XP FDISR snapshots if I could so I decided to try the HIR.

And all went just perfectly.
During the restore process I chose the HIR options and Shadowprotect did it´s magic.
When the different windows booted up they of course installed all the nessecary drivers and discovered the new hardware. I dont know if ther are any issues involved (performance wise) but I havent noticed any.
I just love software that deliver!

 

Sukarof,
Thanks for sharing your good experience with ShadowProtect and HIR.
When I ever change my hardware partially or completely, I hope I have the same experience like you. I'm less worried after reading your post.

 

This is beautyfull example of where HIR stands for [Hardware Independent Restore] Hardware is that different that i myself should have serious doubts to do an HIR restore in your situation, but alas it works so it has more potential then Peter always told us. I understand that with his short experience,and not hitting it hard you are inclined to be a bit cautious in telling us about its inherent power.

 

Yeah, I had doubts myself.
Sure, I figured the HIR would make my disc bootable, but I expected things to be slower and some conflicts so I had to tweak and stuff. I guessed there would be lots of leftover entries in the registry, and maybe drivers that would cause some performance issues or something, but I am positively surprised that all the snapshots runs as smoothly as they do. No problems what so ever as far as I can see...yet atleast.

 

Yes but member Sukarof managed to get it working on his machine without any extra drivers needed,more surprised because his hardware change was remarkable. And as he said that everything works smoothly i hope it stays that way,something missing can show up after quite some time.

 

Probably some Windows drivers substituting for the originals.
Still,good news.