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PC Utilities January 2007
by lan Barker
Acronis True Image 10 Home Making backups can be a chore, but if you have important files, precious family photos or paid-for music downloads on your system then it's something you should get into the habit of doing on a regular basis. Acronis True Image makes the whole process easy, enabling you to back up your entire system, or just certain items like music or emails. The program is wizard-driven, making setting up a backup just a matter of following a few steps. It can back up to another disk, either locally or on a network, and also has the ability to save to an FTP server. You can save directly to a CD or DVD and to removable drives too. If you have a large enough drive you can make a complete disk image. The program also includes a scheduler so you can run backups at selected times without having to remember to do it. You can create backup rules to exclude temporary files, for example, and to allocate a certain amount of disk space. Older copies of data can get overwritten based on how long you specify they should be kept. The program can also create incremental backups, where only data that has changed since the last run gets saved. The big test of any backup program of course is how easy it is to restore your files in the event of a problem. Acronis True Image scores highly here too, with the ability to restore the entire system or just selected files. There's also an option to restore application settings for many commonly-used programs so you don't have lots of stuff to re-enter to get things back running as they were. In the event you have a major problem you can use the program's Startup Recovery Manager to restore the system on boot up. You can boot the system from the Acronis True Image program CD too and use this to initiate a restore in the event that you can't start from your hard drive. The program keeps a log of all its operations so you have a record of when your files were saved. Additional features include the ability to make a secure zone on your hard drive that can only be accessed with a password. This is useful if you need to save sensitive data. If ease of use is your priority, Acronis True Image is well worth considering. All of the key functions are handled via wizards, which make it simple to operate. You'll need to be running Windows XP or Windows 2000 to use the application, though there's support for Windows Vista too, so you won't be left in the lurch if you upgrade.
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