Review: Acronis True Image Home v11

Don Bradbury takes a look at the latest Vista-compatible offering from Acronis

Product	True Image Home v11
Company	Acronis
Web	www.acronis.com
Price	£28.97 from www.amazon.co.uk
We like	Excellent wizards; comprehensive backup and restore options
We don't like	Nothing much
Rating	9/10
Requirements

The folks at Acronis Corp have built up something of an enviable reputation in the field of data backup. They were quick off the mark to give us a Vista-compatible product in version 10 of True Image, and that has had consistently high ratings among reviewers and users alike. Now, with version 11 of True Image Home, extra bells and whistles add further usability to an already mature product.

These include Try&Decide, a temporary place on your computer to load new applications software, downloads from the Internet, or open email attachments, all without risk. If it works OK, then you can apply them, or ditch them if not without endangering your system.

You can now protect applications, such as Microsoft Office or Media Player and dozens of others, by restoring their settings without difficulty. Event backups, privacy protection, system state backup, file searching in your archives, file exclusion, incremental or differential backups, scheduled backups, cataloguing of backups and, of course, sector imaging. It's all there, and more.

Disk imaging is a principal attraction of True Image. No more open file difficulties, and a system restored to truly original state (ie as backed up). No more reconfiguring of your applications if they are corrupted, and you can even use your system while a Restore is in progress! Further, the Acronis Recovery Manager lets you boot the computer to start a recovery process without boot media, even if the Operating System has failed, by simply pressing the F11 key.

 

Strategies

Backup strategies figure large, as you'd expect, with backup rules that manage space allocation for backups and the length of time you keep them and so on. Set and Forget automation of backups that are ensured as long as a traffic light indicator is green, and Smart Scheduling to ensure safety in the event of some potentially hazardous change. True Image is packed with such facilities.

Drive Cleanser is there to ensure safety in erasing the entire contents of a disk, a File Shredder using multi-pass algorithms is part of the package, and System Cleanup is to ensure privacy by erasing the activity track stored by the OS. Further, with True Image, PC Cloning, and the installation of a new hard drive, are no longer the nightmares they used to be.

 

Support

Support is provided for hard disks, network servers, FTP servers, CD and DVD burners, Zip and Jazz drives and other removable media, USB 2.0, Firewire, and PC Card storage devices, plus IDE, SATA, and SCSI and the new SAS. Vista, XP SP2 and Pro x64 edition, and 2000 Pro SP4 are the supported operating systems. File systems include FAT 16/32, NTFS, Linux Ext2/Ext3, Reiser FS and Linux Swap. With RAW Image support for other partitions and corrupted file systems, there's little to complain about here.

 

Installing

Installation was straight forward, with a wizard guiding us through the options available. We backed up both C: (OS) and D: (data) partitions on an Acer 5520 Vista Home Premium notebook to the Freecom Hard Drive Pro we reviewed recently, and it all went without a hitch.

We had partition capacity totalling 118GB, together containing 34.6GB's worth of files, so we expected the backup period to be extensive, but were a little surprised to see it complete within twenty one minutes.

There was a progress bar showing the current state of play, the source and compression involved, and details of the process in hand, which together with a "minutes remaining" timer were all tastefully applied.

All-in-all a process that need not, after perhaps the initial run - to ensure things are correctly set, involve a deal of anxiety. True Image deserves its reputation for understandable backup/restore processing, and this is enhanced in the recently released version 11.

 

Restoration

Again, a wizard was there to guide the first time user through the options, including full disk or partitions, sector-by-sector, or partial.

In conclusion

The newly released version 11 of True Image Home is all you'd expect from Acronis. It's certain to remain on the wish list of all those who value their data, not to mention their Operating System setup, in a world increasingly at risk from nasties in one form or another, man made, user made, or simple corruption. No one should be without a reliable backup and restore strategy and the software to, well, back it up! Try Acronis True Image 11 Home for free (137Mb download).

 

 

 

 

Don Bradbury