Set Up Acronis True Image Cloud Backup: 12 Steps [2026] | #hacking | #cybersecurity | #infosec | #comptia | #pentest | #ransomware

Acronis quietly renamed its flagship consumer backup tool years ago, yet most Australians still type “Acronis True Image” into Google when they want to protect a laptop full of tax records, family photos and half-finished spreadsheets. The product is now officially Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, and the 2026 edition — Acronis confirmed the release in a blog post dated September 30, 2025, with continued Q2 2026 platform updates carried through to the version reviewed here — bundles disk imaging, ransomware defence and dual local-plus-cloud backup into one subscription. This tutorial walks through buying the right tier, installing the app, configuring a real cloud backup job, and fixing the errors that trip up first-time users, based on Acronis’s own 2026 release notes and pricing published by Australian resellers.

By the end you will have a working local-plus-cloud backup running on a schedule, a tested restore, and a second layer of ransomware protection sitting underneath whatever antivirus you already run. This is a practical, step-by-step build — not a marketing tour — and it flags the gotchas that catch out most first-time Acronis users in Australia, from GST-inclusive pricing confusion to cloud quota overruns.

What Acronis True Image Actually Is in 2026

Acronis True Image became Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office in a 2022 rebrand, but the company kept the old name alive in search listings, download pages and reseller storefronts because that is what people search for — and keyword research confirms it: “acronis true image” pulls roughly 720 monthly searches in Australia with low competition, well ahead of the rebranded term. Under the hood it is the same product line: a local imaging and file backup engine wrapped around Acronis’s cyber-protection stack, which now includes AI-assisted anti-ransomware monitoring, disk cloning, and cloud replication.

Acronis’s own September 2025 announcement of the “2026 edition” confirmed expanded compatibility with Windows 11, Windows 10, and current macOS releases, alongside iOS 15+ and Android 10+ for the companion mobile apps. On the business side, Acronis Cyber Protect v17 picked up further updates through Q2 2026, including AI-generated remote desktop session support and expanded recovery tooling — features that trickle down to the consumer Home Office line over time. For a home user or sole trader, the pitch is simple: one subscription that backs up a full disk image locally and to the cloud, watches for ransomware behaviour in real time, and can roll back file changes if it catches an attack mid-encryption.

Where this fits against the built-in options most Australians already have — Windows File History, Time Machine, or a NAS running rsync — is the cloud leg. None of those give you an off-site copy by default. Acronis does, provided you buy a tier that includes cloud storage, which is where the next section gets specific.

Prerequisites and Version Requirements

Check these before you buy anything. Acronis’s compatibility notes for the 2026 edition list the following minimums.

• Operating system: Windows 11 or Windows 10 (64-bit); macOS Sonoma 14, Ventura 13, Monterey 12, or newer Apple silicon releases
• Mobile companion apps: iOS 15 or later, Android 10 or later
• Free disk space: at least 2 GB for the application itself, plus enough local space for your first full image backup
• RAM: 4 GB minimum; 8 GB recommended if you plan to run the anti-ransomware monitor alongside a resource-heavy antivirus suite
• Internet connection: required for cloud backup, license activation, and the anti-malware definition updates; a wired or 5 GHz Wi-Fi connection is strongly preferred for the first full backup
• Acronis account: a valid email address to register the subscription and manage cloud storage
• Payment method: a credit card or PayPal account that accepts AUD or USD billing, since Acronis’s global checkout defaults to USD unless you buy through an Australian reseller

You do not need admin rights on a work-managed laptop to trial the app, but you will need them to install it and to grant the anti-ransomware driver the permissions it needs. If your device is managed by a company IT policy, check with them first — installing a second backup agent alongside a corporate one can create scheduling conflicts.

Step 1: Pick the Right Subscription Tier

Acronis sells three consumer tiers — Essentials, Advanced, and Premium — and the difference between them is almost entirely about cloud storage and the extra security features bolted onto Premium. Getting this wrong is the single most common mistake: buyers assume Essentials includes cloud backup because “True Image” has always meant cloud to them. It does not. Essentials is local-only.

These figures come from current Australian reseller listings (Mediaform and Scorptec both list Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office ESD subscriptions in AUD, ex-GST) rather than Acronis’s US-dollar global price sheet, which lists Essentials from US$4.17/month, Advanced from roughly US$6.08–$7.50/month depending on storage, and Premium from US$10.42/month. Convert those monthly US figures yourself before assuming they match the Australian annual pricing above — currency conversion plus GST is exactly where buyers get caught out at checkout.

If you only want an off-site copy of a handful of critical folders — Documents, tax records, a photo library — Advanced with 500 GB is enough for most single-user households. If you’re protecting a small business owner’s laptop with contracts, client files and a Microsoft 365 mailbox, Advanced’s inclusion of Microsoft 365 backup makes it the practical minimum. Premium is worth the jump only if you specifically need blockchain notarisation to prove a document hasn’t been altered, or you’re backing up more than 500 GB of source material.

Step 2: Create Your Acronis Account and Buy the Subscription

Go to Acronis’s official purchasing page or an authorised Australian reseller — buying through Mediaform, Scorptec, or Quadnet gets you a local invoice with GST itemised, which matters if you’re expensing this for a small business. Enter your email address to create the Acronis account first; this is the identity that ties your license, your cloud storage quota, and your mobile app backups together, so use an email you will still have access to in five years, not a work address tied to a job you might leave.

After payment, Acronis emails a confirmation with your subscription details. You do not get a separate “license key” email in most cases — the 2026 edition activates automatically against your account when you sign in from the desktop app, which is a change from older True Image versions that required manually pasting a key.

Step 3: Download and Install the Application

Download the installer for Windows or macOS from the Acronis account dashboard, not from a third-party download aggregator — several file-hosting sites list “Acronis True Image” downloads that are outdated or bundled with adware. Run the installer and accept the default install location unless you have a specific reason to change it, since the local backup cache and application logs live under this path.

# Windows: verify the installed build after setup completes
Get-ItemProperty "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Acronis*" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-Object DisplayName, DisplayVersion

# macOS: confirm the app version from Terminal
mdls -name kMDItemVersion "/Applications/Acronis True Image.app"

On Windows, the installer will prompt for a UAC elevation to install the anti-ransomware driver and the backup snapshot service — approve both. On macOS, you’ll be asked to grant Full Disk Access in System Settings → Privacy & Security; skip this and your first backup will silently fail to read protected folders like Mail or Photos libraries.

Step 4: Sign In and Activate Your License

Launch the app and sign in with the Acronis account email and password you created in Step 2. The app checks your subscription against Acronis’s licensing servers and unlocks the tier you paid for — Essentials, Advanced, or Premium — automatically. If activation fails, it is almost always one of three things: no internet connection at launch, a corporate firewall blocking Acronis’s activation endpoints, or a typo in the account email during signup that created two separate Acronis accounts.

Once activated, the app’s dashboard shows your device count, cloud storage quota (if applicable), and subscription expiry date. Screenshot or note this expiry date now — Acronis does not always send a renewal reminder far enough in advance, and a lapsed subscription silently stops both local and cloud backups without necessarily uninstalling the app.

Step 5: Configure Your First Local Backup

Click “Add backup” on the main dashboard. You’ll choose a source — entire PC (a full disk image, including the OS, installed programs and all files) or specific files/folders. For most home users, a full disk image of the system drive plus a separate files-and-folders backup for anything on a secondary drive covers both disaster recovery (a dead SSD) and casual file recovery (an accidentally deleted document).

For the destination, pick a local target first — an external USB drive or a NAS share works. Avoid backing up to the same internal drive you’re imaging; if that drive fails, you lose the backup and the original in the same event.

# Example: verify free space on an external backup target before starting
# Windows PowerShell
Get-PSDrive -PSProvider FileSystem | Select-Object Name, @{N='FreeGB';E={[math]::Round($_.Free/1GB,1)}}

# macOS / Linux
df -h /Volumes/BackupDrive

Run this check before starting a full image backup. A first full backup of a typical 500 GB laptop drive with 200 GB actually used needs roughly 200–250 GB of free space on the target after compression, and Acronis will refuse to start (or worse, fail partway through) if the destination doesn’t have enough headroom.

Step 6: Enable Dual Protection (Cloud Backup)

This is the step that actually earns the “cloud backup” name. In the backup configuration screen, add Acronis Cloud as a second destination alongside your local drive — Acronis calls this “dual protection” in its own Home Office marketing materials, and it runs both destinations from the same backup job rather than requiring two separate configurations. This is only available on Advanced and Premium tiers; Essentials subscribers will see the cloud option greyed out.

Select which cloud storage allocation to use (500 GB on Advanced, up to 1 TB or more on Premium), confirm the same source data you’re already backing up locally, and enable automatic sync so every incremental change lands in both places. This is where your first meaningful decision about bandwidth comes in — Acronis will happily try to upload your entire disk image at full speed the moment you enable this, which brings us to scheduling.

Step 7: Set the Backup Schedule and Bandwidth Limits

Open the backup’s advanced options and set a schedule — daily incremental backups overnight is the standard recommendation, with a full re-image monthly to avoid an ever-lengthening incremental chain. Under “Cloud backup settings,” set an upload bandwidth cap if you’re on an NBN plan under 100 Mbps and share that connection with other household activity; without a cap, the first full upload to Acronis Cloud can saturate your entire connection for hours.

# Rough time-to-upload estimate for planning purposes
# Formula: (Backup size in GB * 8) / (Upload speed in Mbps * 3600) = hours
python3 -c "
backup_gb = 200
upload_mbps = 20
hours = (backup_gb * 8) / (upload_mbps * 3600)
print(f'{hours:.1f} hours for a {backup_gb}GB upload at {upload_mbps}Mbps')
"

Run that estimate before you enable cloud backup for the first time. A 200 GB initial upload on a typical Australian NBN 25 Mbps plan (roughly 20 Mbps realistic upload) takes around 22 hours — plan for it to run overnight and through the next day, not “before I leave for work.”

Step 8: Enable Encryption and Set an Archive Password

In the same advanced backup options panel, turn on AES-256 encryption for the backup archive and set a password. This password encrypts the backup file itself, separate from your Acronis account password — if you lose it, Acronis cannot recover your backed-up data for you, encrypted or not. Write it down somewhere outside the device you’re backing up (a password manager on a different device, or a physical note in a safe) because the entire point of this backup is to survive that device failing.

This step is easy to skip because it adds friction, but an unencrypted backup sitting in Acronis Cloud is a single account-compromise away from exposing every file on your disk image. Encrypt it.

Step 9: Turn On Active Protection (Anti-Ransomware Monitoring)

Acronis’s Active Protection module runs alongside your regular antivirus and watches for the specific behaviour pattern of ransomware — rapid, mass file modification with entropy changes consistent with encryption. If it detects this pattern, it automatically blocks the offending process and rolls back any files it already touched using its own backup cache, independent of whether your antivirus caught the initial infection.

Enable this from the Protection tab in the main dashboard. If you’re running a resource-heavy third-party antivirus (Windows Defender is fine and coexists cleanly; some enterprise EDR agents are less cooperative), you may need to add Acronis’s process to that antivirus’s exclusion list to prevent the two products fighting over file-system hooks — this is one of the most common post-install support tickets Acronis resellers report.

Step 10: Run the First Full Backup and Verify It

Click “Back up now” and let it run. Do not close the laptop lid or let the machine sleep during this first pass — a disk image backup that’s interrupted partway through has to restart from the beginning in most configurations, not resume. Once it finishes locally, watch the cloud upload progress bar; the two destinations run largely in parallel but the cloud leg will lag behind the local one on any connection slower than gigabit.

When both destinations show “completed,” don’t stop there — validate the archive. Acronis includes a “Validate backup” option under the backup’s context menu that checks the archive’s internal checksums without doing a full restore. Run this immediately after the first backup completes, and again after any full re-image, because a corrupted backup you discover during an actual disaster is worse than no backup at all — you’ve spent the time and bandwidth, and you still have nothing to restore from.

Step 11: Test a Real File Restore

Validation checks integrity; it doesn’t prove you can actually get your files back under pressure. Pick a handful of real files — a document, a photo, something you’d actually miss — delete your working copies, and restore them from the local backup first, then from the cloud copy. Time both. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it’s the one that matters most: an untested backup is a hypothesis, not a plan.

If you’re protecting a business laptop, go further and do a full bare-metal restore test onto a spare drive at least once, ideally when you set the system up and again every six to twelve months after. This is the only way to confirm the disk image actually boots — a corrupted boot sector or a driver mismatch after a Windows feature update can make an otherwise valid-looking image unbootable, and you only find out at the worst possible time if you never test it.

Step 12: Set Up Mobile Device Backup

Install the Acronis mobile app (iOS 15+ or Android 10+) and sign in with the same account. This backs up photos, videos, contacts and calendar data to the same cloud quota your desktop backup uses — it’s a shared pool, not a separate allowance, so factor phone storage into your tier choice if you’re backing up multiple devices from one Advanced or Premium subscription.

Enable background backup and Wi-Fi-only upload in the mobile app’s settings unless you’re comfortable with the app using mobile data for photo backups — a large photo library backing up over 4G/5G can burn through a monthly data allowance fast.

Common Pitfalls With Acronis Cloud Backup Setup

These are the mistakes that generate the most support tickets and forum posts, based on the pattern of issues Acronis resellers and third-party review sites report for the 2026 edition.

• Buying Essentials expecting cloud backup. Essentials is local-only. If you want an off-site copy, you need Advanced or Premium — there’s no add-on to bolt cloud storage onto an existing Essentials license without upgrading.
• Running out of cloud quota mid-schedule. Advanced’s 500 GB fills up fast once you add a full disk image plus incrementals plus mobile photos. Backups don’t fail loudly when this happens — they silently stop updating the cloud copy while the local one keeps working, so you don’t notice until you actually need the off-site copy.
• Assuming Australian data residency. Acronis’s public materials describe global cloud data centres but do not commit to storing Australian consumer Home Office backups exclusively within Australia. If data residency is a compliance requirement for your business, this consumer tier is the wrong product — look at Acronis’s business-grade Cyber Protect Cloud, where data centre region selection is documented more explicitly.
• Antivirus conflicts blocking Active Protection. Some third-party security suites treat Acronis’s ransomware-monitoring driver as suspicious behaviour itself, causing performance stalls or blocked backups. Add exclusions on both sides.
• Interrupting the first full backup. Closing a laptop lid, letting Windows Update force a restart, or losing power mid-image usually forces a restart from zero, not a resume — plan the first backup for a period the machine will stay powered on and awake.
• Forgetting the encryption password isn’t the account password. These are two separate credentials. Losing the archive encryption password means Acronis genuinely cannot decrypt that backup for you.
• Currency confusion at checkout. Acronis’s global site defaults to USD pricing; Australian resellers list AUD with GST. Comparing a USD monthly figure to an AUD annual reseller price without converting leads to a lot of “why is this so expensive” complaints that are really just currency mismatches.

Troubleshooting Common Acronis Backup Errors

Here’s how to diagnose and fix the issues that show up most often after setup.

1. License activation fails at first sign-in: Confirm the machine has an active internet connection, then check whether a corporate or ISP-level firewall is blocking outbound connections to Acronis’s activation servers. Try activating over a mobile hotspot to isolate network-level blocking.
2. Backup stuck at 0% or “Preparing”: Usually a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) issue on Windows. Restart the Windows service via services.msc, look for “Volume Shadow Copy,” and set it to Manual if it’s disabled.
3. Cloud upload stalls partway through: Check the bandwidth cap you set in Step 7 — if it’s set too low, the job can appear stalled when it’s actually just slow. Also verify your ISP hasn’t hit a fair-use throttling threshold on an uncapped plan.
4. “Not enough space” error despite free space on the target: Acronis reserves headroom for its own metadata and validation files. Free up an extra 10–15% beyond the raw backup size before retrying.
5. Active Protection flags a legitimate app as ransomware: Add the specific executable to Acronis’s exclusion list under Protection settings rather than disabling Active Protection entirely.
6. Mobile app won’t back up photos over Wi-Fi: Check that “Background App Refresh” (iOS) or battery optimisation exclusions (Android) are enabled for the Acronis app — both platforms aggressively suspend background uploads by default.
7. Restore test shows missing files: Confirm you selected “entire disk” rather than “system partition only” when the original backup was configured — a common source-selection mistake that only surfaces during a restore.
8. Subscription shows expired despite recent payment: Sign out and back into the desktop app to force a licence re-check against your Acronis account; the local licence cache can lag behind a renewal by up to 24 hours.
9. Full disk image won’t boot after restore: This is almost always a driver or boot-mode mismatch (UEFI vs. Legacy BIOS) between the source and target hardware. Restoring to genuinely different hardware needs Acronis’s Universal Restore feature, not a straight image restore.

Advanced Tips: Getting More Out of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office

Once the basic backup is running reliably, a few configuration changes push it further. First, set up backup notifications by email so a failed job doesn’t sit silently for weeks — this is buried under Settings → Notifications and isn’t on by default in every install. Second, if you’re on Premium, actually use Acronis Notary to blockchain-notarise any document where you might need to prove it hasn’t been altered after the fact — signed contracts, timestamped creative work, compliance records — since this feature otherwise sits unused despite being one of the tier’s main selling points.

Third, if you manage backups for family members or a small team, Acronis’s account dashboard lets you view storage usage per device from one login — check this monthly rather than waiting for a “quota exceeded” notification, since catching creeping storage use early avoids a scramble to free up space during an active backup window. Fourth, pair your disk-image backup with periodic manual exports of just your most critical files to a completely separate, offline medium — a USB drive kept unplugged and off-site. This satisfies a genuine 3-2-1 backup posture (three copies, two different media types, one off-site) rather than relying on Acronis Cloud as your only off-site leg.

How Acronis Compares to Backblaze, IDrive and pCloud

None of these products compete on exactly the same axis, which is why picking between them depends on what you actually need protected.

If your priority is the cheapest possible off-site copy of files with no frills, Backblaze or IDrive will beat Acronis on price per gigabyte. If you specifically want a product that combines a bootable disk image, ransomware behaviour monitoring, and cloud replication in one subscription — so a single failed drive or a ransomware hit doesn’t mean rebuilding a machine from scratch — Acronis is doing something the pure cloud-backup players don’t attempt. Cloudwards’ review of IDrive notes its strength is broad multi-device pooled storage rather than integrated security, which is a fair summary of where the category splits.

Building a Complete Working Backup Project

Putting every step above together, here’s what a finished, working setup looks like for a typical Australian home office user on the Advanced tier.

Backup Job 1: "System Image"
  Source: Entire PC (C: drive)
  Destinations: External USB SSD (local) + Acronis Cloud 500GB (cloud)
  Schedule: Full image monthly, incremental daily at 2:00 AM
  Encryption: AES-256, password stored in separate password manager
  Bandwidth cap: 15 Mbps upload (of 20 Mbps available)
  Active Protection: Enabled, Windows Defender exclusion added

Backup Job 2: "Documents and Photos"
  Source: Documents, Desktop, Pictures folders
  Destinations: Same USB SSD + Acronis Cloud (shared quota)
  Schedule: Incremental every 4 hours during active use
  Encryption: AES-256, same password

Mobile Backup: Acronis app on phone
  Source: Camera roll, contacts, calendar
  Destination: Acronis Cloud (shared 500GB quota)
  Schedule: Automatic, Wi-Fi only

Monthly maintenance checklist:
  [ ] Check cloud storage usage against 500GB quota
  [ ] Validate System Image backup
  [ ] Confirm subscription expiry date is 60+ days out
  [ ] Test-restore one random file from cloud copy

This setup, run consistently, gets you a bootable local image for fast recovery from a dead drive, an off-site cloud copy for fire/theft/ransomware scenarios, ransomware behaviour monitoring sitting alongside your existing antivirus, and mobile device coverage — all under one Advanced-tier subscription costing roughly $140–$185 a year for up to five devices, based on current Australian reseller pricing.

Security and Data Residency Considerations for Australian Users

Acronis has not published a specific commitment guaranteeing Australian consumer Home Office backups stay within Australian borders — its public materials describe global cloud data centres without country-by-country residency guarantees for this tier. For personal use, that’s a reasonable trade-off most users accept without issue, since the data is encrypted client-side if you set an archive password as instructed in Step 8. For anyone bound by data residency obligations — businesses handling client records, or professionals under specific regulatory requirements — this consumer product is the wrong fit regardless of price, and Acronis’s business-grade Cyber Protect Cloud (which does document region selection more clearly) or a locally-hosted alternative is worth evaluating instead.

General privacy obligations under the Australian Privacy Principles still apply to how any cloud backup vendor handles personal information collected from Australian users, regardless of where the data physically sits, so it’s worth understanding what those principles require if you’re handling anyone else’s data.

Total Cost Over Three Years: Acronis vs. Doing Nothing

Subscription fatigue is real, and it’s fair to ask whether $140–$300 a year is worth paying when Windows and macOS already ship free backup tools. The honest answer is that File History and Time Machine solve a narrower problem than Acronis does — they protect against accidental deletion on the same local network, not against a stolen laptop, a house fire, or a ransomware attack that encrypts your backup drive along with everything else because it was plugged in at the time. Acronis’s off-site cloud leg and its behaviour-based ransomware rollback are the two things free, local-only tools structurally cannot provide.

Renewal pricing is usually close to the first-year price rather than a discounted “loyalty” rate — Acronis doesn’t publicly advertise long-term discounts the way some SaaS products do, so budget for the full annual figure every year rather than assuming a lower renewal cost. If cash flow is tight, buying a 1-computer Advanced licence rather than the 3-5 device bundle keeps the annual cost closer to $140 while you decide whether the product is worth expanding to other household devices.

What to Do If You Decide Acronis Isn’t the Right Fit

Not every setup calls for a bundled backup-plus-security product. If you already run a well-maintained antivirus and just want a dead-simple off-site copy of files, a plain cloud backup tool with a flat unlimited-storage price will usually cost less over time and involve less to configure. If you’re comfortable with a slightly more technical setup and want full control over encryption and destination, a self-hosted tool paired with an S3-compatible bucket avoids the recurring per-tier subscription model entirely, at the cost of doing your own restore testing and monitoring rather than relying on a polished dashboard.

The decision point is really about how much you value integration versus control. Acronis trades some flexibility for a single pane of glass covering imaging, ransomware defence and cloud replication. A stack built from separate tools gives you more control over each piece but means you’re the one responsible for making sure they all actually work together during a real recovery, not just on paper.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Acronis True Image still a real product, or has it been discontinued?
It’s still sold and actively updated — Acronis renamed it Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office in 2022 but kept releasing annual editions, including the 2026 edition confirmed in Acronis’s own September 2025 blog announcement. The “True Image” name persists in search traffic and some reseller listings even though Acronis’s own marketing now leads with the Cyber Protect Home Office branding.

Do I need the Premium tier, or is Advanced enough?
Advanced covers cloud backup, Microsoft 365 backup and mobile app backup for most home and small-business use cases. Premium’s main additions — blockchain file notarisation and Acronis eSign — matter specifically if you need to prove a document’s integrity over time; skip it if you don’t have that need.

Can I use Acronis alongside my existing antivirus?
Yes, and most users should. Acronis’s Active Protection module targets ransomware-specific file-modification patterns rather than general malware, so it complements a standard antivirus like Windows Defender rather than duplicating it. Add exclusions on both sides if you notice performance conflicts.

How long does the first cloud backup take?
It depends entirely on your data size and upload speed. As a rough guide, a 200 GB initial upload on a realistic 20 Mbps upload connection takes about 22 hours. Start it before an extended period the machine will stay powered on, such as overnight into the next day.

What happens if my Acronis subscription lapses?
Local and cloud backups stop running, but the app typically doesn’t uninstall itself or delete existing backup archives immediately. Renew before the expiry date shown on your account dashboard to avoid a gap in protection, and don’t rely on Acronis’s reminder emails as your only warning.

Is my data stored in Australia with Acronis Cloud?
Not guaranteed for the consumer Home Office tier. Acronis’s public documentation describes global data centres without a specific Australian residency commitment for this product line. If residency matters for compliance reasons, look at Acronis’s business-grade Cyber Protect Cloud instead.

What’s the difference between Acronis and a simple cloud storage sync tool like pCloud?
pCloud and similar tools sync live files to the cloud for access across devices; they don’t create bootable disk images or monitor for ransomware behaviour. Acronis is built as a backup-and-recovery product first, with cloud storage as one of two destinations rather than the sole purpose of the product.

Can I restore an Acronis backup onto a different, newer computer?
Yes, but a straight image restore assumes similar hardware. Restoring onto genuinely different hardware requires Acronis’s Universal Restore feature to reinstall the correct drivers for the new machine, otherwise the restored image may fail to boot.