Use Veeam to move system to new hardware

[NetAdMBC]

I have a couple of PCs that I backup each night with Endpoint Backup; I'd like to do a hardware refresh on them, and wondering if anyone has used Endpoint to do that. I've restored entire backups to a new hard drive in the same PC; it would seem to be possible to use the software to restore the backup to an entirely new PC as well. I think it would look something like this:

- use Veeam to make an ISO that will boot the new PC (probably by installing it on an identical PC that already has Windows installed
- boot the new PC with that ISO
- find the backup file either on LAN or on an external USB drive
- restore the backup to the new PC
- sort out any driver issues
- done.

If I'm right about this, it would be useful for these PCs because they have very particular software installed and configured that needs to be duplicated. Has anyone done this? Any pitfalls I'm not thinking of?

[Dima P.]

Hi NetAdMBC,

Any plans to change the hard drive (replace the regular one with SSD)?

[NetAdMBC]

Planning to change the entire PC, actually. Same OS, but better hardware (it's running Win7-64 on a Core2Duo right now, and we want to bring it up to i5).

[chaycock]

I have done it, and it worked pretty well, no issues with Veeam. It took a couple of reboot cycles because Windows was loading new drivers for the chipset, but in the end, the machine did come up and work.

[Dima P.]

True. That should work. My point was if you are replacing the hard driver and want to restore operating system to a smaller disk its recommended to run a defrag prior creating a backup (you need to eliminate the unmovable blocks at the end of your volume layout). Aside from that I can’t imagine any issues.