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Viruses. Malware. Rootkits. Poorly-written drivers, "critical updates" and patches that sometimes do more harm than good. Months of excess baggage left behind in the registry from installing and uninstalling dozens of programs and drivers, and corrupted registry keys from all those wonderful blue-screen crashes that finally forces Windows to collapse under its own dead weight. This is the hi-tech minefield your PC navigates on a daily basis, putting the hours you invested in tuning and tweaking it to perfection, and all of your valuable data, at risk. Fortunately, there's Acronis True Image 10 Home to help keep your data out of harm's way.

Whether it's important financial information, a music or photo collection or a Level 50 Dark Elf you've spent a good part of the year developing through thousands of hours of quests and treasure-hunting through ancient ruins and dungeons, you probably don't have to be told how important it is to perform backups on a regular basis. The only way to insure that backups are done on a regular basis is if the software is easy enough to use, and is as hands-off as possible while doing its job.

Acronis True Image 10 Home &mdash Your One Stop Backup Solution

Some backup programs perform traditional file-by-file backups. Others perform sector-by-sector image based "disaster recovery" or "bare metal" backups. There are even a few that do both. But you'd be hard-pressed to find one that does so as easily with the power and flexibility of Acronis True Image.

Acronis True Image 10 Home does more than just file-by-file and image backups using the usual full, incremental and differential backup schemes. Acronis True Image can clone and prepare new hard drives for installation, recover your system and allow you to log into it immediately, and work on it while the recovery process continues in the background &mdash and more. In addition to maintaining the same powerful but easy-to-use features, which has made it such a success over the years, this newest edition has some exciting new features in its repertoire of tools and tricks.

About Acronis

Acronis offers storage management solutions that are technically advanced for mission-critical applications but easy to use. The company provides disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning, boot management, privacy, data migration, and other storage management products for enterprises, corporations and consumers of any qualification. Acronis has offices in the United States, Europe and Asia and sells its products through retail outlets, resellers and on the Web.

Backup Methodologies &mdash Strengths and Weaknesses

With traditional file-by-file backups, each file and folder is backed up sequentially to removable or non-removable storage, making it easy to choose whether to backup up the entire hard drive or just a few files and folders regularly. File-by-file may excel when it comes to restoring individual folders and/or files, but when it comes to a "bare metal" restore after a catastrophic system or hard drive failure, that's when its weaknesses become apparent. To get your system functioning again, you have to

Reinstall Windows
Reinstall your backup software
Retrieve your latest backup set
Hope that your backup software can restore critical system files and registry keys that Windows has locked open without incident &mdash otherwise you're looking at a time-consuming re-installation of everything from scratch, and then using your backup software to recover your data.

Finally, a file-by-file restoration, especially in a disaster-recovery situation, is just plain slow.

Checkpoint backups can automatically take "point-in-time snapshots" of your PC's system state, data files, or both at preset intervals or when a change has occurred (like a program being installed or removed). System Restore, Shadow Copy (now known as Previous Version), and Symantec's GoBack, fall into this category. This method has its drawbacks as well:

Older checkpoints are overwritten by newer ones at regular intervals, making them less than ideal for long-term data archiving.
The files may be stored on a hidden or special partition which makes them inaccessible to the user for off-loading to another storage medium to recover and use later for disaster recovery. Even if you could, most checkpoint programs won't allow it anyway.
The hidden or special partition is usually on the same drive being protected. Lose the drive, and you lose the checkpoint files.
Some third-party checkpoint software requires special device drivers that are not compatible with every version of Windows &mdash or could cause conflicts with other disk utilities.

Imaging makes a sector-by-sector snapshot and backup of the entire hard disk in its current state. Imaging is invaluable for doing a "bare metal" restore after replacing a failed hard drive, or recovering from a Windows installation that can not be repaired. You don't have to reinstall the OS, your programs, or your precious data. With your most recent image backup, you can restore you system in half the time it would take using either of the previous methods. Of course, if you want to recover a single or just a few files, until recently you were out of luck with Imaging's "all-or-nothing" method of data recovery.

As you can see, if you wanted a complete and flexible "best-of-all-worlds" backup solution, you had to go through the hassle and expensive of investing in and using multiple backup programs. Fortunately, Acronis solved that problem with Acronis True Image.

Installing Acronis True Image 10 Home

Whether you've purchased the downloadable version or physical media, installing Acronis True Image 10 Home is as quick and easy (it's a good idea to temporarily turn off any anti-virus or programs running in the background, before installing Acronis True Image). Just start the install routine and follow the onscreen prompts. If you select the Full installation of Acronis True Image or the Custom installation and check all the options, you'll install the Acronis Acronis BartPE Plug-in which will allow you to incorporate Acronis True Image into a BartPE recovery CD or DVD disc.

This is the main installation screen. From here, you can install Acronis True Image, download the latest User's Guide which requires the free Adobe Reader; or go to Acronis' Technical Support Registration page.
Click next in the Welcome dialog box to start the installation.
The License Agreement for your perusal.
Unless you want to install Acronis True Image in a 15-day trial mode, enter your Serial Number here. If you've purchased the upgrade version of Acronis True Image 10 Home, you'll be presented with an additional prompt to enter your serial number from a previous version of Acronis True Image.
Select the type of install you want here. Typical installs everything but the Bart PE plug-in, Custom allows you to select which Acronis True Image components to install and change the default target folder for the installation. Complete installs the whole enchilada to the default installation folder.
You can accept the default here, or change it to Install for the current user only if your account has administrator privileges and you share your PC with others that have limited user accounts.
If you want to make any changes, you can click the Back button otherwise, click Proceed to start the installation.
Acronis True Image 10 Home will install in less than a minute.
Once the installation is complete, click Close.
Click Yes to reboot your PC. If you are upgrading directly over a previous version and don't see this prompt to reboot, you'll have to uninstall Acronis True Image and reinstall the newer version "clean."

If you're upgrading from an earlier version or build, you normally don't have to uninstall it to install the latest version. However, you should always be prompted to reboot your PC immediately after installing Acronis True Image. If you aren't prompted to reboot at the end of the installation, that means the upgrade failed for some reason.

To confirm whether the upgrade was successful, reboot and check under HelpaAbout on the menu bar. If it wasn't, uninstall Acronis True Image, reboot, and re-install the newer version again. You'll be prompted for the serial number of your previous version of Acronis True Image, so you don't have to re-install the old version first, and then the new version on top of it.

In order to download the latest Acronis True Image updates, you must register your copy of Acronis True Image 10 Home.

The True Image 10 Home Interface

Acronis True Image is divided into a Menu Bar, Button Bar, a Microsoft Outlook-style Side Bar, and the Main Task Window. The Status Bar at the bottom displays any in-progress operations. You can perform most of Acronis True Image's operations from any of these locations for convenience, as well as hide the ones you don't want to use by clicking the arrows that collapse them out of sight. The default backup and restoration options, as well as the ability to send notifications when an operation has been completed, can be configured through Options on the Menu Bar. You can even change the fonts used in Acronis True Image's menus and display panels if the default system font doesn't suit you.

Acronis True Image 10 Home has a leaner and cleaner look from Version 9 and earlier versions. You can perform Acronis True Image's most frequently-used functions from the classic Menu Bar under Operations as well as the Main Task Window.
View allows you to tweak the appearance of the Menu Bar, Tool Bar and Status Bar.
Acronis True Image's most frequently used tools can be accessed through here. You can also configure the program's default options from the Tools menu as well.
Online and web support can be accessed through here, as well as the obligatory "About" information that shows you the Acronis True Image version and build number, your serial number and other pertinent information.
The Toolbar allows you to perform Acronis True Image's most frequently used operations as well. Here we see the button for running the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager wizard. The two grayed-out arrow buttons on the left become active when switching between operation pages in the Main Task Window.
This button runs a verification job against backup archives to make sure they aren't damaged or corrupt.
This one creates the all-important Bootable Rescue Media that will allow you to load Acronis True Image and restore your system if Windows becomes unbootable or if you need to recover from a failed hard drive.
This button creates the Acronis Secure Zone^® &mdash a special partition for storing backups &mdash on local hard drives.
Click this one, and you'll bring up the Operations Log where you can view status messages of all your backup and restore jobs.
Need help? Click this button.
This takes you to the Acronis Customer Service page. Clicking the "Acronis" logo in the upper-right hand corner takes you directly to Acronis' home page.
Click the little arrow on either the Menu or Tool Bar...
...and you can collapse it out of sight to give you more viewing real estate &mdash or if you'd just rather not see it all. Clicking the arrow again restores the bar.
You can do the same for the options on the Side Bar...
...like so. The Status Bar below displays the currently selected operation on the left, and any currently active operations and their results on the right. Double-clicking on the results brings up the Acronis True Image Operations Log.

A relatively minor but noticeable and welcome improvement over Version 9.0 is the removal of the Task Bar and window used by Acronis True Image's Scheduled Tasks from the lower half of the main window. The result is a cleaner look for the interface. Now when you want to schedule a backup job, or perform any other task under the Manage Tasks and or Pick a Tool category, you'll be taken to a second page in the main window for performing those tasks. A pair of Navigation Buttons on the left side of the button bar that are grayed-out when you launch Acronis True Image, turn green and become active whenever you choose a task on the second page, allowing you to flip back and forth between pages with ease. New Acronis True Image users will definitely like Acronis True Image 10 Home's clean, simple interface, while veteran users will appreciate that all the program options and selections are exactly where they'd expect them to be without having to hunt around for everything.

All of Acronis True Image's functions are wizard-driven with Plain-English descriptions of each step. A summary at the end outlines the operation you are about to perform, and you are always given an opportunity to go back to make changes or abort the operation. Acronis True Image's clear and simple Online Help is always one mouse-click away from several convenient locations on the interface (unlike Version 9.0, you can now output help topics to a printer). Clicking the blue and white question mark icon from within a wizard immediately brings up help on the current operation being performed. More detailed information on how to use Acronis True Image, trouble-shooting, technical tips, and definitions of backup technology jargon, is available in the 94-page Acronis True Image 10 Home User's Guide, which can be downloaded in Adobe Acrobat .PDF format from the Acronis web site.

Bootable Rescue Media: The First Step in Protecting Your Data

As soon as you install Acronis True Image 10 Home, your first order of business should be to create Bootable Rescue Media via the Acronis Media Builder wizard, which will allow you to start Acronis True Image and recover your system from an Acronis True Image backup if you can't boot into Windows. If you bought and installed the boxed, version, you can boot Acronis True Image directly from the CD.

When creating rescue media through the wizard, you're given the option of installing either a Full version of Acronis True Image to the media that includes drivers for USB, PC Card (PCMCIA) and SCSI disks; a Safe version without these drivers &mdash or both. The full version requires 35.45 MB of installation space, the safe version 16.83 MB; installing both will take up 47.62 MB. You can also set the number of seconds the rescue media waits for user input in the menu before launching Acronis True Image.

Acronis True Image 10 Home Review @ BRnR. Part 2 >>

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