PC World November, 2004 by Jon L. Jacobi Original on the PC World Website
Acronis Revs True Image
Rating: 4/5 The new Acronis True Image 8.0 feels more like a maintenance release than a major upgrade over version 7.0. It does, however, boost the backup application's performance to levels comparable to those of Symantec's recently launched (and quite speedy) Norton Ghost 9. Both programs create sector-by-sector snapshots of your hard drive for easy recovery after a system crash; but in tests conducted for our recent review of Ghost 9, it performed dramatically faster than Acronis True Image 7.0 did, producing smaller images. Like Ghost 9, Acronis True Image 8.0 skips the re-creatable swap and hibernation files, yielding similar speeds and even smaller image sizes. In my informal tests, Ghost 9 imaged a 3.2 Gb partition in 1 minute, 25 seconds, generating a 1.4 Gb image file. My shipping copy of Acronis True Image 8.0 completed an image of the same file in 2 minutes, 42 seconds, but it produced a smaller, 1.2 Gb file. (Acronis True Image 7.0 took 5 minutes, 34 seconds, making a 2.5 Gb file.) Though Ghost 9 is speedier at creating images, Acronis True Image 8.0 is much faster at booting from the recovery disc. In my tests, Ghost 9 took a whopping 2 minutes, 25 seconds to launch, while Acronis True Image 8.0 took only around 15 seconds. New tweaks in Acronis True Image 8.0 enable you to verify images before restoring them; and like version 7.0, version 8.0 can create incremental backups. Acronis True Image 8.0 enjoys some clear advantages over Ghost 9. It works with any version of Windows (Ghost 9 works only with XP and 2000), it doesn't depend on Microsoft's .Net framework the way its competitor does, and its full version is $20 less expensive. The worst drawback of Acronis True Image 8.0: Owners of previous versions have to pay $30 for this decidedly minor upgrade. That said, if you're looking for a solid-performing, reasonably priced drive-imaging application, Acronis's latest Acronis True Image is a good choice.
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Acronis Inc. Backup software.