Acronis products are designed for the following scenarios:

• You can create a disk/partition backup and restore it to a different machine to transfer the entire existing system to new hardware (you may need to use Acronis Universal Restore if you plan to transfer the system to dissimilar hardware).

  See:

  1. Acronis True Image 2020: Restoring to dissimilar hardware with Acronis Universal Restore
  2. Acronis True Image 2019: Restoring to Dissimilar Hardware with Acronis Universal Restore
  3. Acronis True Image 2018: Restoring to Dissimilar Hardware with Acronis Universal Restore
  4. Acronis Backup: Restoring to Dissimilar Hardware with Universal Restore
• You can create a disk/partition backup of an existing system before performing an upgrade to a new operating system or before making a clean install of a new system. You can use Acronis products to restore the old system from the backup in case something goes wrong.
• You can create a file/folder backup of your personal data and restore the files and folders to the new system.

Acronis products are designed as a backup and recovery solution, and they do not have the special functionality to transfer or recover installed programs to a different system. 

(!) Acronis products are not designed for the following scenarios:

• Sample scenario 1: You have an old computer with Windows 7 and a new computer with Windows 10. You want to transfer installed programs from Windows 7 machine to Windows 10 machine. - Acronis software does not support this.
• Sample scenario 2: You have Windows 7 32-bit installed and you want to install Windows 7 64-bit instead, and you want to transfer all programs to new Windows 64-bit system without the need to reinstall them. - Acronis software does not support this.
• Sample scenario 3: You have Windows 7 installed and you want to upgrade to Windows 8. - Acronis software does not support this.

It is impossible to copy existing applications to the new system using Acronis products.

The main reason is that you cannot just copy installed programs to a new operating system. To function properly, programs have to be installed using the installation routine to write various configuration settings and to set up configuration files in proper places. Even if you copy the contents of Program Files folder to the new system, most programs will not function because during installation additional data is placed to other folders and to Windows registry.

In brief, installed applications "integrate" into Windows to function.