It is a common “feature”, since MikroTik staff stated many times that bakcups are intended for the same boards.
What you can do if you want to avoid wiping complete confinguration is reset each interface mac address, then go to Interfaces and open Ethernet tab, sort them by mac address and rename them accordingly.
I find however the situation to be difficult in a real world scenario.
We have a number of RB1100’s out in the wild, installed at various time that are left to run until they fail.
General policy is not to fix what ain’t broke, and so we do not upgrade as upgrades are available, lest something break
irretrievably.
We also have RB1100’s in house as backups for when one in the field dies, like from lightning.
We have nightly config backups on our the remote routers which are ftp’d back to
a central server.
Usually the OS 6.x versions of the backup routers in house are different from the routers in the field, the house routers
are newer for example and come with newer firmware.
So if one dies in the field, we take its last backup, stick it on one in the house, and it fails because what? Not the same
OS 6.x version? Sorry that is a real big problem.
Is this because the RB1100’s are different or because the various versions of OS6.x are different?
If the RB’s are identical machines, but with different OS versions, would this be a problem?
Since router boards are changing all the time, what dependable solution do I have to quickly
replace a field router with a LARGE complicated config as fast as possible?
Have you ever heard of export and import commands? Even there are differences between the versions but you can easily adapt the script before the import accordingly to the actual syntax.