Acronis Disk Director 11 Home Edition (PC)

I have an ageing PC (8 years old which is pretty old) running XP. I have 2 drives, 180Gb and 120Gb, with the 180Gb having 2 volumes - C: and E: which holds music, among other things. The 180Gb had just 100Mb left so I thought of buying a new drive. When I was researching I came across many references to Acronis and thought this might actually help as I had about 20Gb of unallocated blocks I couldn't get at. I thought I'd give it a go before the hassle of formatting/fitting the new drive.

Well, in a nutshell Acronis really came up with the goods. It is a fairly small install with little to think about. The interface is very slick and anyone with a small bit of knowledge (eg drive letters and capacities) can just get on with the program as it is so intuitive.

It found the unallocated blocks, let me convert them to volumes and then let me join them up with the existing volumes. Suddenly my full drive had another 20Gb. Incredible! I then took the time to copy folders off of the drive and reformatted it to NTFS. Again this was simple. The menu options changed if you couldn't do certain things so you always knew what was possible. Then rather than incremental changes being processed it saved up the changes until I was ready to commit and then processed in one hit.

When I accidentally called a volume a wrong letter it was easy to change it again (it just needed a reboot).

I have only scratched the surface of what the package can do but I am already a big fan and would recommend this to anyone who wants to adjust drive settings in any way (I haven't even considered the backup facilities or disaster recovery yet). The price is amazing for what it does.

Highly recommended.

Had a spot of bother trying to install this software at first it wouldn't install due to some disc error, so I ran the demo install instead and added the serial number which was 64 character phew!!! I'm pleased to say that idea worked. I got this mainly to do Clones of drives as backups cause its much easier and leaving it to get on with it instead of copying file to file. Theirs a great feature that will let you click on switch off auto that switches off the PC once the Cloning has been finished. I checked the contents of my drive and its made an exact copy of my main backup drive so I have 2 copies of my back up drive now knowing that my data is backed up and safe. The operation was pretty straight forward that anyone with basic PC knowledge can do without problems due to the built in wizard. You can also do a complete system backup of everything on your C drive too inc OS or indeed any drive thats connected to your PC internally as well as by USB means. You can make up a recovery CD should a virus or something mess up your PCs disk volumes. Everything about this program is extremely easy to use weather you want to extend disk volumes, set up a RAID system, format volumes, etc. You can also select from a wide variety of file systems when formatting volumes, including NTFS, ReiserFS, Linux Swap, even defragment and more which is handy having all these things in one program. Windows of course will let you do some of these things but not as easy as Disk Director, I was very disappointed with True Image by Acronis but this time they have done a good job with this program.

Review for Acronis Disk Director 11 Home Edition
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i have always found the basic partitioning tools avialable on Windows very lacking. There was some good tools round such as PowerQuests Partition Magic one of the best all time classics, was intially the only one that could resize existing partitions on the fly and this was like a decade ago. Unfortunately the company disappeared a long time ago so I was interested to see how the latest Partitioning Tools stood up to it. As with any Partitioning Tools, you can end up inadvertantly deleting, loosing or messing up operating systems or data, so make sure you are familiar with partitioning in general before you use these tools!

Installation was a surprise, requiring a ridiculously large serial key, and what is it these days for many software titles to come without printed manuals ?!?! This came with a short quickstart guide and online help, but with specialist technical software such as this would surely merit some printed documentation? Maybe its just me with high expectations?

The program supports all the usual formats ntfs, fat, fat32, ext2,ext3, reiserfs etc, although notably lacked the Mac file system and other lesser used formats such as xfs etc. Good see the program supports basic,simple, striped and mirror volumes, although in my test I only used ordinary volumes.

Usage wise it looks like a coloured version of the xp windows disk management tools albeit with a lot more features than the standard windows disk management tool, but having used parition magic over the years I could help feeling the gui could have been a little more intuitive - may not be so freindly to users not used to partitioning tools, although each operation opens a wiazrd to take you to the relevant task, so maybe its not so bad?

I didnt go down the recovery disk route as trying to create a Windows PE based recovery disk requires 1Gb+ of the Windows Automated Install kit - it kind of makes my head spin when for example recovery disks for PM were two 1.44Mb floppy disks - one to boot into dos (you could use your own ones for this) and the other to run a 500kb dos recovery version of the program!! It wouldnt be so bad if the newer programs offered strides more functionality than the older tools.

Some of the features in Disk Director are simply a front end for standard Windows features. For example, Disk Director includes an option to defrag your drives, but this actually just runs the Windows defragment utility via command line.The Acronis OS selector looks much better than the old parition magic boot switcher. Im old school so I still prefer grub or lilo to handle that side of things. Operation wise it is very similar to Powerquests PM.

For any other old timers this tool is slightly better than the older tools as it does purport to support hard drives larger than 2Tb and obviously the older tools will usually only support MBR (master boot record) whereas this supports the newer (well not that new) GUID parition table type disks (GPT), although I suspect most will still use the MBR type volumes.

Although Acronis is a well known brand name, it does not compare well price wise for home usage - take a look at Easeus Partition Magic (free home edition which offers most, but not all of the features in disk director) and profesional Easeus PM version at a similar price to this product. Intrestingly enough Easus is more similar to the original PowerQuest Partition Magic. Users may want to review easues PM or take the free version for a spin first, or look at the other good alternatives such as Paragon which also offer free and professional editions.

Overall not a bad program if you need to partition a lot, however I think these are a set of tools that have limited appeal as most users will not need to manage partitions on a daily basis - not recomended for non technical users, unless you read up on this first, because of the inherent hazards of partitioning.