Acronis True Image
Posted on: 07/02/2003 11:00 PM

Ever lost your hard drive and spent hours reinstalling Windows, all the updates, personal preferences and all your favorite programs? What if you could have restored it in minutes? Acronis TrueImage creates an exact image of your hard drive which can be saved to hard and floppy disks, recordable CD/DVD media, ZIP, Jaz and other removable storage devices as well as network drives. You can use this image to restore your complete hard drive as you have saved it. I originally discovered Acronis years ago when similar programs, like Norton's Ghost, did not support NTFS partitions and have been hooked ever since.


[thumb]acronistrueimage5.jpg[/thumb] [thumb]acronistrueimage6.jpg[/thumb]


Install was straight forward and offers the option to repair/upgrade or uninstall if you already have TrueImage installed. Aside from that you can pick a custom path and whether to install for all users. Finally, before install completes, you can create bootable rescue media which allows you to boot your computer for drive recovery. Normally, you will finally be asked to reboot to complete the installation. The installer provides links in the start menu to the program itself as well as the bootable rescue builder, user guide, website, readme and the uninstaller.


[thumb]acronistrueimage1.jpg[/thumb] [thumb]acronistrueimage2.jpg[/thumb]

The interface starts out simply enough, explaining how the program works, followed by a screen asking you if you want to create, restore or explore and already saved image. The explore option will create a virtual drive where you can access any of the files in the image and copy them to wherever you would like, handy to simply restore a folder or file that may have been corrupted, for example. Creating a backup clearly shows all available partitions so you can choose which drive to backup from or to. Simply choosing a name, the amount of compression (which gives an approximate size and time required in advance) will have you creating an image of your drive in minutes. Other options are offered including whether you would like to split the image into multiple files (useful for smaller media backup like CDROM or ZIP drives), password protection and even comments you can add to that particular image. These are all simply option and simply clicking next allows you to skip all these features and simplify your back-up.


[thumb]acronistrueimage3.jpg[/thumb] [thumb]acronistrueimage4.jpg[/thumb]

The program is quite speedy, creating an image of a 46 gig partition in approximately 8 minutes with little compression. Restoring a complete image can be a lot longer than creating one, but with the built in Rescue Media Builder, its as easy as booting from that CD, telling it where the image is, and what partition to restore it to. You can wander off for dinner or TV and reboot your computer to the image you have saved, ready to go in roughly 30 minutes for an 80 gig drive. The time to save and restore images is hard to estimate here because larger partitions and more compression takes longer then a smaller partition and no compression.

As stated earlier, I tried Acronis when no other product on the market would allow me to save from NTFS to FAT32 and vice versa. Since I tried Acronis True Image, I have become a registered user and rely on it on my work machine on a regular basis.

Score: (4/5 Stars)

---