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PC Mechanic

July 26, 2006

by Jason Faulkner

Original article at PC Mechanic web site

Product Review: Acronis True Image 9.0.1

Preface

Consistent backups are a task everyone knows they should do, but surprisingly hardly anyone gets around to actually doing it. The fact is, your hard drive is the device on your computer most likely to fail and houses all of your data. What if your hard drive crashed or you got infected with the latest trendy virus? Do you have a good backup? What would you lose? your business files? email? term papers? Let's face it, hard drives are an inevitable disaster which we think only happens to other people, however it is a disaster which can be easily recovered from... if you are prepared.

The product I will be reviewing today, Acronis True Image 9.0, is one possible solution to make sure you are prepared in the event of a disaster. While Acronis True Image boasts a lot of features, I will be evaluating this for the scope of a user on their personal computer backing up their data. On a related note, the screenshots will be from the Workstation 9.1 release of Acronis True Image, so the home version shots may be slightly different.

Installation

The installation screen greets you with a welcome screen which gives you the option to install all of the Acronis True Image components. For the purposes of this review, I will be testing on a single machine simulating a home user, hence only be looking at the Acronis True Image application.

Overall, the installation was pretty easy and standard. I just had to accept the obligatory license agreement then select either typical, custom, or full install. For the enterprise user, the fact that the management utility installations are offered in the same install file as the Acronis True Image application is a plus. Everything can be installed without downloading individual packages making more complex implementations easier.


Acronis True Image 9.0.1 Workstation Installer

Primary Interface

Acronis True Image's interface is very much in harmony with the Windows XP theme. The blue color scheme and "cartoonish" icons should be very familiar to any Windows user. Featuring a standard menu, toolbar, common task sidebar, a primary "icon" menu and finally, a "toolbox" menu Acronis True Image's functions are easy to invoke.

By default, I believe the interface is over-cluttered with all of the menu bars enabled, so through the View menu I disabled the toolbar and sidebar as all of their items are available through the icon menu and toolbox. This is strictly my opinion, but overall the interface is very nice and makes the program look very user friendly.

Acronis True Image 9.0.1 Workstation

Disk Cloning

Since I was going to be intentionally destructive to my Windows install, I decided to test Acronis True Image's disk cloning feature first. Once the option is selected, Acronis True Image launched its disk cloning wizard. The wizard was very simple, asking only one question per step with the use of radio buttons as the only input. Upon selecting an answer for each question, a detailed description of what each option does is clearly explained in a text area below, insuring the user fully understands what will happen. This is, of course, assuming you choose to manually configure the cloning process. If you are not comfortable configuring the process yourself Acronis True Image offers an automatic setting which makes the disk cloning procedure a virtual "no questions asked" one.

For the purposes of this review, I chose to manually select the settings and even so, the process of creating a disk clone was extremely simple. The wizard path I chose went like so:

Welcome screen
Use default setting or manually set options — I chose to manually set, so you will not get the following path if you choose automatic
Select source disk
Select destination disk — Acronis True Image will warn you if you select a non-empty disk
Destination partition layout — manually define, keep or destroy... I chose to destroy in order to make a Acronis True Image (pun intended)
Destroy data parameters — to zero write the drive (your path may be different if you chose a different option above)
Data move method — as is, proportional or manual; process of determining how to size your destination partitions in case the drive sizes are not the same
Confirmation screen 1 — shows a graphical representation of how your source and destination partition scheme will look
Confirmation screen 2 — shows exactly what will happen next

Acronis True Image's wizard told me everything it was going to do and upon a reboot, the process was completed in a screen very similar to when Windows is first installed. Just to be sure, I rebooted using my newly cloned disk and, as expected, it worked perfectly. I was quite impressed with the ease of use and explanations provided by the wizard and, not to mention, very pleased with the end result.


Disk Cloning

Backing Up Data

Fresh off the creation of a disk clone, I moved to primary focus of Acronis True Image, backing up data. Upon selecting the appropriate task a wizard is presented. The first question asks for the type of backup, a disk partition or file copy. Since I had just done a successful disk clone, I chose the file copy. The wizard proceeded to ask me several questions and configured my backup:

Welcome screen
Select files and folders to backup
Configure exclusion filters (for those of you who want to get very specific)
Backup file save location
Backup type
- Full — All files and folders are backed up
- Incremental — All files which have changed since the last Full or Incremental backup
- Differential — All files which have changed since the last Full backup
  Note: this differs from an incremental as it only requires the last full backup to completely restore where an incremental requires the full and all subsequent incremental backups to completely restore
Detailed backup options configuration (this can be skipped by selecting default options)
- Password protection
- Pre and Post commands to run during the backup process
- Compression level
- Backup process priority
- Archive splitting (to make your backup fit on CD's, etc.)
- Email notification
- Windows Event Log message generation

One feature worth noting is Acronis True Image will backup open files such as Word or Excel documents, however I would personally recommend you save and close all of your work to prevent application lockups. If you do decide to configure the detailed options, you will find they are actually quite powerful. The pre and post commands allow you to do tasks such as stop services which may have locked some files and release them gracefully prior to your backup and then restart the services when the backup is complete. Using the pre and post commands, I was able to run a Microsoft SQL command (using the osql.exe command line tool included with MSDE/SQL 2000) to backup my SQL databases to a .bak file prior to the file copy backup and then delete it once the backup process finished. Additionally, the options to control compression level and process priority are a nice touch to give you some control over the amount of system resources the backup process will use.

Once again, the wizard is quite thorough in explaining what each option does, so you do not have to be adept with computer terminology to create a solid backup procedure. Of course your backup can be performed manually or on a predetermined schedule with their scheduling tool.


Backing Up Data

Recovering Data

Now that I have a backup file, I wanted see exactly how easy it is to restore the files. With a simple click of the recovery task, as expected, I was greeted with another wizard. The recovery wizard options went like so:

Welcome screen
Select backup file to restore (Acronis True Image uses a .tib file extension)
Restore destination — original or alternate location
Files to be recovered — this shows you the file structure of the files as they were backed up on your system so you can easy locate the files and folders to restore
Detailed restore options configuration (this can be skipped by selecting default options)
- Pre and Post commands to run during the restore process
- Restore process priority
- Email notification
- Windows Event Log message generation
Optional restore file filter — for example, only restore .doc or .xls files
Restore mode — absolute overwrite, overwrite if restore file is newer, do not overwrite

The steps are pretty basic and each option is explained to the user as they step through the wizard. Overall, the recovery process went well, as expected, however I did experience a problem I will elaborate on below. Again I would like to stress the detailed options Acronis True Image offers as I found it extremely powerful for performing a thorough restore. My test was to restore a Microsoft SQL database backup file (which was backed up as explained above) through the command prompt after restoring the file, and then remove the backup file. As expected, my test worked flawlessly.


Restoring Data From a Backup

Problem: I did experience trouble during my restore process. The issue came when I tried to restore a file to the desktop using the restore option of absolutely overwriting (the file I was restoring was older than the current file... I wanted to overwrite the newer file with the older one). I got the error in the screenshot below. My hypothesis is Acronis True Image tried to overwrite a protected system directory (Desktop) with the copy in its backup, which Windows would not allow it to do. While it was an annoyance, the workaround was to simply restore it to an alternate location. Considering how well Acronis handled all other functions, I was a bit surprised that an option was not presented to me on how to handle the problem. I imagine if a user did not think through the problem and know to go back and restore to an alternate location they might become frustrated by not being able to restore their data.

Error Recovering Data

Included Tools

Acronis True Image includes several system configuration tools as well. While most of these are available in (and included with) a standard Windows install, Acronis True Image makes them all available in a single place and ties them together nicely with their interface. These tools include:

Backup Scheduling — run backups on a predetermined schedule or whenever you logon on logoff of Windows
Bootable Restore Media Creation — create a bootable CD, floppy, or USB disk; for computers without a CD burner, you can create an ISO to burn on another machine
System Restore Configuration — for managing the space Windows allocates for restore points
Add New Hard Disk — allows you to create and format partitions on a new hard drive and assign drive letters

The advantage of using these tools through Acronis True Image is simply you get a wizard interface for each, so you do not have to understand exactly what you are doing as the Windows interface expects.


Bootable Recovery Media Creation

Additional and Add-On Tools

As I mentioned in the preface, I would be evaluating the program using the perspective of a typical personal computer user, however I am going to take this space to discuss the enterprise level features of Acronis True Image as well as additional products Acronis offers.

Enterprise level tools: (note: these are available in the Acronis True Image Workstation version, but not in the Home version)

System Administrator control panel to monitor and schedule jobs on remote computers
Remote deployment of Acronis applications
Image Mounting — view and the contents of a disk image created with Acronis True Image without restoring it

Additional Acronis products and add-ons for Acronis True Image:

Acronis Universal Restore — Add-on for Acronis True Image Workstation which allows you to restore system images to different model machines without worrying about driver conflicts ($29.99).
Acronis Snap Deploy — Standalone product with which you can easily create and restore system images to machines in accordance with your own "standard load" ($19.99) [purchase Acronis Universal Restore for Acronis Snap Deploy for an additional $9.99].
Note: you can create images using Acronis Snap Deploy or use images created with Acronis True Image

While the home user will most likely not need these features, system builders and corporate system administrators would find them very useful.

Documentation

An often overlooked, yet crucial, part of any software product is its documentation. After all an application is only as useful to the user as how much they know how to use it.

Acronis True Image's documentation is accessible via the Help menu (obviously) which opens a connection to the web and downloads the documentation in PDF format. The PDF has a table of contents which links to their respective topics for easy navigation. The topics are covered well, however I found the explanations provided by selecting the different options when going through the wizards to be just as good or better. Additionally, when progressing through a task wizard, there is a help button available on each step to access the appropriate documentation.

While I understand why the documentation is in PDF format (there is a Linux version as well and I imagine the functionality is the same), I thought having a typical Windows CHM help file would have been a nicer touch. CHM's are the standard for Windows help files and what most users are familiar with (however most users should be familiar and comfortable with PDF's as well). One upside to having the documentation in PDF on the web is you can easily get and review it to help your purchasing decision.

Overall, the documentation is good, but as mentioned above the descriptions the actual task wizards give are often times better.

Final Thoughts

Everybody knows (or should know) performing frequent backups are crucial. Inevitably, some data will be accidentally deleted or your hard drive will fail and you need to be ready, or you will regret it. For this reason, I would highly recommend Acronis True Image to individuals who do not currently have a solid backup process in place. The cost is for Acronis True Image (home version) is $49.99 (with Workstation being $79.99), however this will seem like peanuts when disaster strikes.

Considering how easy Acronis True Image is to use (I only read the documentation for the purposes of the review, as I found everything pretty intuitive) and how little time it takes to make and schedule a thorough backup process, I believe the price is well worth what you get. Even better, you can download a fully functional time limited trial of Acronis True Image from Acronis' website, so you really have nothing to lose by giving it a shot.

In closing, if you take nothing else from this review, I hope I have stressed to those who do not have backups how important they are. There are a myriad number of tools to backup your data. Acronis True Image is simply a great "out of the box", reliable solution for those who do not want to spend time writing, testing and updating command line scripts.

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