Acronis True Image Home 2010: Backup and Recovery (PC)

Okay, cards on the table, I have been an Acronis user for several years, using their previous versions to backup. I've always found their products (Disk Director and True Image) to be trouble free and great value for money. I have no connection with Acronis, other than as a satisfied customer.

A couple of years ago, I bought a USB attached hard drive (750GB capacity) and began doing complete weekly partition backups of my laptop onto that USB drive, using the previous Acronis version to this one. The way that works is that Acronis copies the entire contents of your hard drive (not just your files, but also all your system settings, bookmarks and so on) into a single - huge - file on your USB drive.

When you think about how much time and effort you've probably put into customizing your PC and installing extra stuff on it and so on, it makes a lot of sense to do more than just backup your files. Anyone who has been through the hassle of having to start again after a hard drive crash for which there was no backup will recognize the value of backing up your complete system settings as well as all your files.

My USB drive could hold about 3 weekly complete backups of my laptop drive (Using just Acronis's default normal data compression). Each backup took about 4 hours to complete, but I just set it running last thing on a Sunday and it was done by Monday morning and it always worked perfectly.

When the hard drive in my laptop failed - on a Monday as it happened - all I had to do was get a replacement hard drive fitted into my laptop. Then I booted up from the Acronis CD, connected my USB drive, and with just a few clicks Acronis restored my complete system back to precisely the state it had been the day before!

I lost nothing: All my data, my files, my website bookmarks, my media library, my desktop settings - everything was PRECISELY back as it had been. Within about 3 hours of getting the hard drive replaced I was working again, just as if nothing had happened. Now, that's magical stuff.

I remember that the previous time I had a disc failure, when I had only been doing desultory file backups in a half-arsed kind of way, it took me the better part of a week to get the laptop back to something close to what it had been, and I still lost some files that I could never replace. So, the improvement gained by having bought Acronis was WELL worth it.

Thus, as an Acronis fan-boy, I'm glad to report that this version is just as good and works every bit as well as the previous one. I fancy it may be a little bit faster than the previous version, but I haven't bench marked it. They've tidied up the user interface a little too. It wasn't hard to use before, but now it's even easier.

As before, you can go back and extract files or groups of files from the backups of your complete hard drive. The way that feature works is that you tell Acronis to make your most recent partition backup file appear as an additional drive letter on your system. Then you can use Windows explorer to browse the contents of your backup and copy and paste whatever files you need to retrieve, just as if it *really* was an additional drive you'd installed. Really simple to use.

I am running Windows XP and am thinking I might try W7: I did try Vista last year, but was not impressed, so went back to where I left XP - again just by using Acronis to restore my last XP partition backup - more magic! So, having this 2010 Acronis version will de-risk trying out W7 for me, with the security of knowing that I can restore my XP system very quickly if W7 doesn't appeal.

Alan T

Backup software isn't the most exciting urchase you can make, but it is essential - as I discovered to my cost recently when my PC crashed and I had to reformat the hard drive and endure the tedium of reinstalling all my software, drivers and settings. All of this could have been completely averted had I backed up my hard drive periodically but we live and learn, sometimes the hard way....

So, having learned a valuable lesson, I ordered Acronis True Image Home 2010 as 'insurance' against future disasters and have now been using it regularly and reliably for three weeks - and it works well.

Installation was swift (even when entering the ridiculously long 64 digit licence key) and when presented with the startup screen (see my uploaded screenshot) offering options to backup/recover disks, files & folders selecting from a recent backup archive, it was simple to set up my first backup job, ie an image of my PC's hard drive onto an external drive together with producing a boot CD to get the PC started and able to access the image, should the PC fail again. Additional backups can be set, eg to copy all your working files onto a backup drive (or other media) and these backups can be full or incremental, ongoing and automatic, run manually or at user-specified intervals. There is also the option to backup into an online archive (chargeable) which may be useful for small files - but I tend to backup large directories and this would be an unnecessary expense for me.

Another useful feature is 'Try and Decide'. If you visit dubious websites or are hesitant about trying certain software, then this creates a temporary space on your PC, set apart from your operating system, and allows you to visit untrusted websites, download risky drivers or open suspicious emails without risk - if anything goes wrong, you simply discard the changes made while in the 'Try & Decide' mode. Having once experienced disasterous incompatibilities after downloading an update for a graphics driver, this mode provides pleasing reassurance.

I've given True Image Home 2010 a thorough testing over several weeks and found that it's worked well for me. The scheduled backups have taken place and the restoration I tested was successful so I have no complaints. I have found it to be intuitive and user-friendly - see my uploaded screenshots to see how easy it is. I haven't needed to contact technical support or Acronis so can't rate the customer service offered.

Based on my experience, I would recommend this to anyone wishing to avert a PC disaster by ensuring both their system files and data are reliably backed up for any future restoration needed.

I purchased this Acronis software after upgrading to Windows 7 and finding that my Norton "Save & Restore" package would no longer run - and Norton do not appear to want to make it work under Windows 7 either.

Acronis TrueImage seems to work Ok on my desktop system and it does everything promised, although the backup files created are not very compressed and take up to twice the space of the equivalent files generated by the Norton software. Also it takes about 2 to 3 times longer to perform a backup.

TrueImage 2010 also seems to have some annoying bugs and shortcomings. The main grief so far has been with the way it handles timestamps and system times. For instance each backup process generates a logfile in which the messages are timestamped 1 hour later than they actually occured. Also manually triggered backups generate file names that contain the date in the form dd-mm-yyyy" whereas scheduled backups contain the date in the form "mm-dd-yyyy"" which is the mad North American sequence. In any case timestamps in file names should be in the form "yyyy-mm-dd" so that files are correctly ordered in an alpahbetical listing. Other time stamping issues are present.

Be warned also that installation involves manually entering a 64-character licence code - and don't be fooled by the flier that comes in the box about an easy way to do this - it doesn't work.