3rd Party Backup Programs

Palcouk has covered the Acronis as you have found.

Virtualisation involves using a host program such as Virtual PC (Microsoft) or VirtualBox (Oracle) to build and run an entire PC as a program on the host PC. It emulates the hardware of a computer and stores the disk drive of that computer as a file. Because the PC hardware is virtualised it will be exactly the same no matter what the physical host PC has in it. So if you are running the host on a 965 initially if you then have to import the virtual drive on to a host built on a H67 it makes no difference.

The emulated hardware is relatively basic and is mostly supported by Windows without additional drivers. Sysinternals provide a tool to extract a working PC into a virtual disk  here which then can be used to create an absolute copy but as Virtual PC.

Acronis TI has the ability to restore an image to differing hardware as well as amending any partition sizes on the target http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/trueimage/

In any data sensitive business you might be advised to run two differing types of backup, both an Image and a data backup to a secure offsite location

I use Acronis TI, and a separate data backup service to a secure cloud based server

No you can't do that directly. The program installer may run several different processes as well as loading the individual  program directory, it can install libraries and register them, generate the menus and make numerous modifications to the registry. If the program requires C libraries or .net framework it will check if they exist or add them as required.

If that critical I would look at virtualising the system as this would not be hardware dependant. I had somebody with an old Borland database customer management system which would not even run on 7, I was able to virtualise the XP PC and run it in Microsoft Virtual PC. System images are not entirely tied to the same computer however if the platform is significantly different then you would have problems. Some of the paid for Acronis tools will help to modify an image to support different hardware.

Thanks Palcouk, I appreciate the information.  In fact I followed your link to Acronis,, got on a chat session, and one of their product specialists called me back.  We had a good productive conversation, and I'm going to order the Acronis IT Premium today.  It's on sale through the end of December for $49.99; a $30 discount from the regular price.

The product specialist told me that the product could restore the entire image - INCLUDING THE OS - to any other computer.  That's the kind of product that I've been looking for.

Thanks again for the information.

Thanks HairyFool, I was afraid of that, and I understand what you've said about the program installation. 

I'm not sure, however, that I understand your description of the virtualization.  I sounds like you did it with a single computer.  I was under the impression virtualization required two or more computer.

Either way, I don't think that will solve the problem.  Since the virtualization happens in one place, that wouldn't help me in the case of a fire, storm, flood etc., since I'd still have to replace the computer.

Please tell me more about those Acronis tools you mentioned.  I'm not at all familiar with them.