Equivalent to Nandroid on Windows?

Hey!

I'm catching myself having to reinstall system from time to time and sometimes that it's not even my decision so I just wanted to ask whether there is a way to restore literally everything from one system to another. I know that is possible on Android using custom recovery like TWRP but I just wanted to ask whether that is possible on Windows. I guess it cannot be possible in a way that you restore literally everything since every PC is different in terms of drivers in like that but I'm asking about making a backup on one PC and then restoring the back up with all the data back to that PC once you reinstall the system.

Thank you for reading!

I believe Macrium Reflect has the facility to create a system image, and then restore the image to another device with different hardware

It's not something I use myself but there are people on the forum that do ...

a site search should get you started - but I'm sure one of the actual users with experience of this will be along to help shortly

@Bree I was reading what she did only yesterday using Macrium Reflect, Post #3 here and Post #6 here . I am sure she would not mind me dropping her name in, and giving a mention.

Hi there
These days Windows has reasonably good "Hardware Search" so often you can restore an image to different hardware and Windows will find the required drivers (or can be searched for). So the Free edition of Macrium is on the whole good enough for this purpose.

When moving / copying to new hardware though you might need to re-activate Windows -- although these days with digital activation it seems remarkably tolerant compared to the old days where just adding another internal HDD could cause you to re-activate Windows again.

Cheers
jimbo

iko22 said:

I am sure she would not mind me dropping her name in

Click to expand...

It's 'he' actually ('Bree' had other meanings to me when I chose it) but no, I don't mind.

Yes, I have a licensed Reflect so I could restore to dissimilar hardware with its ReDeploy premium feature if I wanted to. I have never yet found it necessary, Windows itself does a good job at sorting out the drivers to use.

barman58 said:

I believe Macrium Reflect has the facility to create a system image, and then restore the image to another device with different hardware

It's not something I use myself but there are people on the forum that do ...

a site search should get you started - but I'm sure one of the actual users with experience of this will be along to help shortly

Click to expand...

That's right and I will wait for various experiences so I can ask people what I want to know.

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
These days Windows has reasonably good "Hardware Search" so often you can restore an image to different hardware and Windows will find the required drivers (or can be searched for). So the Free edition of Macrium is on the whole good enough for this purpose.

When moving / copying to new hardware though you might need to re-activate Windows -- although these days with digital activation it seems remarkably tolerant compared to the old days where just adding another internal HDD could cause you to re-activate Windows again.

Cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

Thanks!

Will it restore literally everything since I have hard drive dedicated to games solely.
Will it restore "Downloads" folder for example which is something I can backup to other place but just asking.
I have two hard disks and one of them contains programs while other contains games. Is there a way to backup two hard drives in one backup which would be combined or it's one hard disk followed by one backup?

When you make a backup with Macrium (and indeed, other software), whatever you backup is what you (are able to) restore, with the only real limitations being 1) available drive space, and 2) the backups themselves not being corrupted.

Each backup is normally done on a per-drive basis, but you can back them both up in a single process. Therefore, restoring would require restoring each drive separately, but, again, you should be able to restore them in a single process, just perform what is usually called a batch restore.

For the games though, consider this: Unless you have poor internet connectivity, or games no longer available from a source, it might be better ot consider just backing up the relevant save games and mods and such, rather than backing up entire games, particularly if you're talking about modern titles, which can run anywhere from tens of GB of data to hundreds of GB, when including hi-res data / remastered games with hi-res / 4K content.

The vast majority of games I own are through a platform, and I can always reinstall the game at any time, so I typically do not backup the games themselves.

But, as I noted, it depends upon your own situation - what works for me may not work for you.