Heya,

I'm currently setting up my Blue Iris installation from scratch on a new Server, background for that is that I want to change a few things around in the way my setup is built.

Due to not being able to use my license on two servers at once I have to use the Demo version on the new server for now. So far I noticed that the "Blue Iris Evaluation Version" overlay seem to crash BI randomly, about every 10 minutes or so. I also noticed that before it does the evaluation banner in the middle gets immensely big, then a few minutes later it crashes and is back to normal size. It seems I can also force-crash Blue Iris by simply saying "Restart Camera" whenever the text gets this big.
However, I'm not 100% sure if that is the reason it crashes, it's only been a somewhat consistent "before it craps out" thing I noticed Can of course also be something else.

No judgement, but that strategy seems to me to be difficult to control for unknowns, and evaluating performance of new hardware in evaluation mode is a challenge to troubleshoot. It isn't immediately obvious why you're doing it that way. To be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong to do that, I'm saying I don't understand why. If I may, the following may be germane. If the objective is a test drive of BI on a new machine, here's what I'd do to leverage the built in features of BI to move the license.

1. Study the information on p.215/216 of the help file -> Backup.
2. Launch console, export BI REG two ways: 3. Export Registry branch (p. 215, second fail safe)
4. Copy c:\blueiris -> New machine
====== Now you have all the settings backed up for transfer or restoration ====== 5. Deactivate License on old machine
a. Global settings -> About -> Deactivate
6. New machine -> Install BI -> Console -> Activate with license key
7. Global settings -> About -> Import Settings
8. Close BI, reboot machine.

Personally, when I'm preparing for surgical procedures, I always create a disaster recovery backup. I use Macrium Reflect (there's a free version) to be able to restore my whole system to 5 AM of any day in the past 60 days. That's the final nuke option - restoring my machine when my plan goes sideways.

All of the above is based on assumption. Maybe if you provided more detail on the goal - what you're trying to determine... cuz, I would rather cut off my little finger than troubleshoot an evaluation version of anything. Not sayin' I'm right, just sayin' that's how I see it.

I've set up Blue Iris a few years ago and noticed that a few default settings over the years have changed, which I now would rather want to use than the old settings from a few years ago.
I just wanted to try a fresh start and manually adding cameras and optimizing settings instead of trying to work on an old config. It's the same as reinstalling Windows as example, it's common practice to not drag your old system installation onto a new hardware and start from scratch

I don't want to outright kill the old server and license before the new one isn't running as well as the old one, since I'm also experimenting how exactly I want to set it up now, how much storage continuous recordings need and so on. Worst case I'd end up with a few days of no security footage which I really want to avoid.

Ahhh, gotcha. I dunno man, I wouldn't do it that way. No judgement, but you'll learn a butt load more by transferring activation. And you can drive it like you stole it ...

Yeah, I just ended up moving my whole old Setup over incl. all the BVR files and it went really smooth. I "panicked" a bit too early it seems Downtime was only about an hour or so.
However I made the mistake of importing the Failsafe backup at first which, for whatever reason, automatically Disabled the BlueIris service constantly upon trying to start it.

Still, it detected all my recordings, all Alerts, settings etc. perfectly fine on the new machine! Nice.

Version being used?

Yeah, whenever I've imported the whole shebang, she coughed and threw up. Then she was better.