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Stephen Lawton
Acronis, Inc.
+1 (510) 285 1055, ext. 7030
stephen.lawton@acronis.com

Original article on Let's Talk Computers website

How to Make Sure You Can Restore Your Computer Backups to Completely Different Hardware

Complete Transcript of Stephen Lawton — Acronis Interview on Let’s Talk Computers Host Alan Ashendorf

August 2, 2008

Alan: You just had a computer system crash and now you have to restore all of your data, but you’ve done this many times in the past so there is no problem. But this time you find you have restore all that data to a completely different hardware system. Now, what do you do? Our guest today is Stephen Lawton, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing with Acronis. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Stephen.

Stephen: It’s always a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you so much.

Alan: Stephen, we’ve been talking about why it is so important to always make sure that you back up all your computer systems on a regular basis. We talked about restoring your computer system; but now we find ourselves having to restore our computer data to completely different hardware. It’s not a case where we can just take the backup that we did and just kind of throw it on our computer system.

Each computer system can be slightly different, even though it’s the same brand name, could be the same model number. It could be different in just very different ways. That’s where most back up systems really let you down.

Now, with your Acronis Universal Restore we don’t even have to think about this being a completely different hardware system. What we want to do is to get the computer system back up and running as fast as possible.

Stephen: Right, you can’t just take the hard disk out and stick it into another machine. With Acronis True Image Echo Workstation and the Acronis Universal Restore add-on module, you can simply boot up a brand new piece of hardware.

It can be HP, it can be Acer, it can be a no-name brand – you would launch the boot disk with Acronis True Image and Universal Restore and take the image from your Dell for instance, lay it onto this new piece of hardware and lo and behold, when you reboot that system, it’s going to say, "Hi, I’m your Dell System." Here now is everything that you had on your computer.

Alan: If you try to take one computer and move all your information and your .dlls and your drivers like your video drivers, your network drivers – they may be the exact same model; it’s a very good chance they are not going to be the same version. Windows is very picky as far as what it finds in those driver sections. All it takes is one file to be the wrong version and you "blue screen." And you know, the blue screen is not fun to look at.

Stephen: No, it’s not. But, we manage that. We allow the system to not only recognize the different hardware and to install the drivers that it needs, but it will also ask you when you’re doing the restore, if you have drivers that need to be installed. So, you can add drivers to the "reinstall," and then revamp your system on the new hardware, very simply.

Alan: We are finding out the hard way. For a business that has just wiped out their whole business – whether it’s fire or flood or hurricanes or even tornadoes now – you have to go to another site and another set of computers. You can actually build a boot disk that we can get ourselves up and running in minutes, can’t we?

Stephen: You can do that. Because we have the Universal Restore capability, you don’t even necessarily need to know what the hardware is that you are going to be putting your image onto. The image might be living on a server that’s located at your ISP or some other company that your’re hiring to host your machine and they can be anywhere in the country. They can quite literally be any where in the world. And again, you don’t necessarily know what hardware they are running. It doesn’t matter. You could still restore your image and be back up and in business.

Certainly you will need to rebuild your own infrastructure so that you have your servers, locally. You don’t need to worry about, "Gee, what model was I running? What drivers did I have? What SCSI card did I have? What SCSI drives was I running?" None of that really matters. The important thing is that you get a server; you get your system up on it as quickly as possible; you rebuild your own infrastructure and then you bring it all back.

Alan: So, you can go from say, and IDE drive to a SCSI drive with a new controller or to the new SATA drives and it really doesn’t matter what you did have. It’s what you do have now that’s important.

Stephen: You can go from a 36-bit CPU to a 64-bit. You can go from AMD to Intel. Essentially, what Acronis does is that it separates the data from the hardware platform, itself, (from the underlying hardware technology.) And it makes that image, "transportable."

Let’s say for example, you have a machine and you need to restore it, but by gosh, you don’t even have another machine to put it on yet. For example, say you have another machine that’s available, but it’s being used.

You can create a virtual machine using say, VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server, any one of another of virtualization operating systems and create a virtual machine on that other piece of hardware and restore the image to that virtual machine. Now you have a place for that machine to live where you can still use it while you replace your failed hardware.

Alan: It gives you the best of both worlds because some times you just need to get certain files off your computer system and this way by putting it into a virtual world, you can see how it’s working and grab those files.

Stephen: You certainly can. There are a number of tools out there that will help you move from the physical world to the virtual world. Certainly, each of the virtualization operating system players has a number of very fine tools that are actually free.

The issue occurs when you want to move from the virtual environment back to the physical world. There are not a lot of tools that allow you to do that. You can do that very simply with Acronis True Image Echo, because we see a virtual machine exactly the same way that we see the a physical machine.

Alan: One of the problems that people have is their whole system goes down and they don’t have a store brand computer. They don’t go out and buy a Dell or HP. They are satisfied with building their own. And when you build your own, you take a bare bones hard drive and put it into a computer case that has a motherboard that you are familiar with and you have a bare bones computer. How fast can you get us up and running again with all the information from our old computer?

Stephen: If you have an image of your old system and you’ve got the boot disk with the Acronis True Image Echo Workstation and Acronis Universal Restore you would simply put that disk into the new machine, even though there is no operating system on it and no operating system on the hard disk.

You would turn on the machine and that disk would boot the machine, itself. It would ask you what you want to do and you would say, "I want to restore." You would tell the machine where the image is and it would take that image and it would lay that image right on that completely bare hard disk. And then when you reboot that machine you would be back up and running with your old image on your brand new machine on which is on your brand new hard disk.

Alan: And that’s what they call a "bare metal restore?"

Stephen: That is a bare metal restore. That is a very common way of restoring machines that have failed in corporate environments as well as in home environments. Quite often for some hobbyists, for example, it’s just more fun to build their own machine. If you have a machine that failed then you want to get the latest and greatest in the new machine you can do all that without reconfiguring the operating system and all the applications. You simply build your new machine with all your new hardware; take your old image; lay it on and you are off to the races.

Alan: A lot of companies find that it’s more economical to buy what they call a bare bones machine that has the motherboard; it has a hard drive in it; it has a network card; a video build onto the motherboard – but does not have an operating system on it. And they can get those at a very, very good cost.

Stephen: You can pick up some very powerful bare bones machines from retailers such as TigerDirect or Newegg.com at very good prices. I’m looking at some of these machines these days and they are very inexpensive. What they are missing is the operating system.

If you are just adding the machine; if you want to increase the number of machines for example in your small business and you’ve got an image that you want to deploy to the new machine, you could simply pick up one of these bare bones machines, deploy the image and you now have another machine working in your office for a whole lot less than it would cost to buy a name brand machine.

Alan: So, you don’t even have to worry about restoring the operating system to the new computer?

Stephen: Your new system will look like and believe itself to be your old system. It will just be running on a new set of hardware.

Alan: And if the other machine is not workable, which means that the other operating system on that other machine is not workable and you’ve just transferred everything over, you’re still legal, because you are still running the same operating system that you bought.

Stephen: That’s absolutely correct. In some business environments the business might purchase multiple licenses for Microsoft and have the ability to simply deploy multiple copies of their operating system onto new machines. So, in a corporate environment you’re not worrying about the license issue. You don’t have to go out and buy a brand new license with each new machine, because you may have already purchased 100 licenses from Microsoft.

Alan: Do we have to buy the Universal Restore when we buy the Acronis True Image or can we buy the Universal Restore at any time?

Stephen: Actually, you can buy the Universal Restore add-on Product at any time. To give you an idea of one of the differences between the way that we approach the Universal Restore and the way our competition does, with our competition you actually have to have their version of Universal Restore in their image if you want to restore that image to another machine.

If somebody is using our Software and has a machine that they imaged, say 2-3 years with our older versions and they find that they have to restore this old machine to get data off it, (and of course, they don’t even know what hardware that was on,) you can use our Universal Restore with Acronis True Image Echo Workstation and restore that old image to a machine today.

Now, we recommend that you buy it at the same time because it’s very convenient to have both the application and the Universal Restore on the same boot disk because you will need them if you want to use Universal Restore. No, there is no requirement that says you have to buy it at the same time you buy the Product.

Alan: Stephen, what are we looking at as far as the price of the new True Image Echo Workstation?

Stephen: The price of Acronis True Image Echo Workstation has been consistent now for several years. The base price for the Product, which includes the Management Console and the ability to image across networks, across domains, is just $79.99. The Add-on for the Universal Restore is an additional $29.99.

Alan: Stephen, let me just put you on the spot for a minute. If you had pick one feature that separates Acronis True Image Echo Workstation from all the other backup software that is on the market, what would it be and why?

Stephen: Ooh, that’s a tough question! Probably the most important feature that we have is our Universal Restore capability that allows you to restore that image to any piece of hardware. Now, there are other products out there that have similar capabilities. What you will find with these other products is that in order to restore the system, you first have to configure the operating system and you will need to reconfigure the network parameters.

If you have a network environment with multiple users and multiple mail configurations for example you will have to reconfigure all of those switches, as well. Not only does it take a lot of time to do this, but every time you are sitting there touching the configuration of your machine you run the risk of introducing new errors.

With Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, with the Acronis Universal Restore you know that all you need to do is simply restore the image and all of those settings, all of the system identification numbers, everything will be restored correctly so that new machine will boot and will run.

Alan: If somebody would like to find more information about the Acronis True Image Echo Workstation and of course all of the other backup software that you have on your Website, where would they go?

Stephen: You can visit us at http://www.acronis.com.

Alan: And as always, it’s been a pleasure to have you as our guest here on Let’s Talk Computers, showing us how we can back up our computer system, having that piece of mind by knowing that it’s always going to restore no matter what we restore it to. We look forward to talking to you again real soon.

Stephen: Thanks so much for having me on the show. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you.