Newsletter

CHIP (Malaysia)

March, 2005

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Acronis True Image 8

Ghost Buster!

Disk imaging just got a bit easier and faster.

For those who aren't familiar with this software, Acronis' True Image series allows the user to create an image (i.e. normally a complete but compressed copy) of their hard drives to a different partition. This is incredibly handy, as you'll know if you've ever lost a lot of work as a result of a suicidal hard drive.

Acronis is no stranger to hard drives - it's built quite a name for itself over the years with a string of very innovative hard-drive management tools (most notably Partition Expert). Up until now, True Image has been somewhat overshadowed by Norton Ghost, which has traditionally been faster, easier to use and better known. True Image 8 brings some serious weaponry to the table though, in the form of massively improved backup times, greater flexibility and a substantially lower price than Ghost. As we see more people realising the importance of backing up their data, we also see backup giants like EMC charging in for a piece of the pie, and many other players beginning to pull their socks up:

New and Improved

As mentioned earlier, True Image 8 represents a marked improvement over the last iteration. Indeed, it's now considerably faster than other hard drive and partition imaging programs (now around twice the speed of Symantec's Ghost 9), and provides flexible, reliable and very manageable backups. The quoted times for backups were generally way off (in the program's favour, they were considerably shorter), and on the whole we were pleasantly surprised by the light resource load while backing up. We were comfortably able to continue using our test PC for routine tasks while True Image did its stuff in the background.

We continue to be impressed by True Image for a whole host of reasons: it's easy to use, it has the ability to create an image of the active Windows partition on the fly (without exiting the OS, or even putting too much of a dent in system performance), it's able to span images (i.e. split them into manageable file sizes), it allows selectable compression levels and provides estimated sizes, it allows easy incremental backups, and perhaps best of all it provides users with the ability to browse an (obviously read-only) image by mounting it as a logical drive. Boot disk recovery and both setup and use of Acronis' Secure Zone feature were also relatively straightforward and surprisingly easy to manage.

CHIP's Conclusion

True Image 8 makes light work of an otherwise gruelling task, by simultaneously providing the user with both a great degree of flexibility and an easy to understand interface. Following the success of Partition Expert, we would've loved to have seen some of the partitioning abilities of Partition Expert integrated into this program. Nonetheless, this one's still the cheapest consumer disk imaging program on the market, and it performs superbly.

Darcy Wilson