I’m currently running Bootcamp, Catalina 10.15.5 and Winclone 8.2 on a mid-2015 rMBP and I’m about to purchase the new (ish) 16-inch model. I use Windows 10 via Parallels exclusively for work, on which I have several CAD design software installed (Autodesk AutoCAD etc).
Restoring Winclone images has always been painless for me, but I have some concerns that since there is a large hardware jump, that this will all work correctly. My planned method would be to restore my latest Time Machine backup from my NAS drive to the new Macbook, partition the drive to add a NTFS volume, then proceed with the Winclone restore.
As is currently stands, can I be confident that an image from a relatively old Macbook can be properly restored to the latest Macbooks? Am I likely to get any issues with licensing with Windows software when restoring the image?
Tough question. Winclone will migrate the data, make it bootable, and inject the drivers for the mass storage device. Our testing shows that it typically results in a bootable Windows install. However, it depends on drivers installed by Windows. It usually is straightforward.
As for the Windows license key, it depends on the edition of Windows and the change in hardware. Software in Windows should continue to work if the license keys are not tied to the hardware.
I’m going to make sure that Windows is fully up to date and that I’ve done a fresh backup before attempting this. Is there anything that I should look out for that may have gone wrong in your tests that I can prepare for? Or is it a case of simply trying it out and hope that it works, since there are so many different combinations of drivers / software.