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Stephen Lawton
Acronis, Inc.
+1 (510) 285 1055, ext. 7030
stephen.lawton@acronis.com

Original article on Let's Talk Computers website

How Backing Up with True Image Echo Workstation Takes Away All Backup Excuses Part 2.

Complete Transcript of Stephen Lawton – Acronis Interview on Let’s Talk Computers Host Alan Ashendorf

May 17, 2008

Alan: By now, all of us really know how important it is to back up our computer systems on a regular basis. We know this and yet a vast majority of people still does not back up their computer systems regularly. Why is this? Today we will be continuing our conversation with Stephen Lawton, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing with Acronis. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Stephen.

Stephen: It’s always a pleasure to be her with you.

Alan: Stephen, last time were talking about how relying on the System Restore that comes with your operating system can really give you a false sense of security, because it really doesn’t back up everything that you need and it can probably leave you in worse shape than what you are in right now. You also talked about that, “If people don’t make full regular backups they need to at least make incremental or differential backups on a regular basis.”

But, people always wait till the last moment; they wait until they absolutely know that they need to backup their computer system – like when the hard drive is making all kinds of funny noises and then when they try to use backup software to back up their hard drive, it gets about half way through and crashes, because it cannot read a sector on a bad hard drive. Well, that’s why we wanted to back up our hard drive in the first place – because we knew it was going bad. And now, we can’t back up the hard drive at all.

Your True Image Echo Workstation now makes that problem a thing of the past because now you set it so that it will actually ignore the errors.

Stephen: You sure can. You have the option of either stopping on the error or you can simply tell the Software to acknowledge the error and keep on working. So, that if you find for example, a bad sector on the hard disk and that bad sector returns an error message, the backup will continue to work. But, it will simply know that there’s a bad sector and that there was an error that occurred during the backup.

Alan: And a bad sector is not going to be that big; but normally it’s very critical and it would stop the whole backup process and if we lose a sector, what are we going to lose - maybe 256 bytes of data?

Stephen: It sort of goes back to the old DOS days when bad sectors really could cause significant damage to the operating system. And it normally was not just one or two bad sectors. The operating systems today are much more sophisticated. They know how to handle bad sectors.

They can map out the bad sectors and say, “Don’t put any data here.” When Acronis True Image looks at the hard disk, sector-by-sector, it will find those bad sectors. We used to simply report them and say, “There’s a problem here. Fix the sector before you go on.” Now, we don’t do that. Now, we give you much more flexibility when you’re creating your image to simply acknowledge and bypass those error messages.

Alan: And knowing that that backup that I just made is so important to me, you actually give me an option that I can verify the backup that I just made to make sure that it is a good, readable backup and everything is absolutely perfect.

Stephen: Absolutely. We actually have quite a few options that a user can set before or after – one of which is to validate the backup before you tell me that everything is done and complete. Another is that you have the option to have pre and post commands.

You can tell the Software, “Before you run this backup, do these various commands; when the backup is completed, you can do these other commands.” You’re writing a script that gives quite a bit of power to the backup application. So, you don’t have to go in and do configurations, manually.

Alan: Using the pre-commands you can actually make it run ScanDisk and clean up any kind of bad sectors; make sure that it’s right and then do the backup. But, when you get finished, you can leave a message on the screen that says, “Everything is nicely backed up.”

Stephen: The key here though is to make sure that you don’t have to have an engineering degree to run a backup, because quite frankly if the Software were that complex that somebody had to have a technical understanding, chances are, they just wouldn’t do it. We want to make it as easy as possible.

Alan: Most backup programs allow us to split the backup – whether we want to back up to a CD or a DVD. But you go one step further; you actually allow us to set much of our CPU that we want to devote to the backup process. Because, that’s important, I want to be able to do things with my computer while it’s backing up in the background.

Stephen: When you do your backup, you might be running other applications. Acronis True Image Echo Workstation is not only appropriate for a home network, but also for a business. It might be a 24/7 business. Perhaps somebody has a website and they are selling goods around the world.

They don’t have the luxury of knowing exactly when their website’s not having a lot of transactions. So, you can actually tell the Software, “I want certain applications to have priority with the CPU.” And other applications will have less priority - the same thing for the network.

You can give for example, one of your database network priority; so you can always move your transactions quickly. And the backup would be a little bit lower on the priority list. It’s not going to impact the user when you’re doing the backup. It doesn’t really matter if the backup takes 20 minutes to complete or 45 minutes.

Alan: And of course you have compression built-in and you can password the backup so that if somebody actually got the files it wouldn’t make any difference.

Stephen: That’s right. There are quite a few switches that you can set to make the backup the most effective and reliable for your application. We do this because we know that, “One size does not fit all users.” Each user has different needs, different requirements.

Some are just looking for the easiest backup they can create; others have more complex networks and they are looking to create a backup that meets specific needs. So, that’s what we try to do – we try to give them as much flexibility as possible.

Alan: It’s very important where you back up. Let’s just say that you’re backing up to a hard drive and it’s online and now you get a virus on your computer system. It’s very possible that it can wipe out the backup. But, you have Acronis Secure Zone that eliminates that problem, don’t you?

Stephen: We do. The Acronis Secure Zone is actually a “hidden partition.” Windows can’t see it, but we can. Since Windows can’t see it; and if your system gets a virus there’s no way that it could infect this hidden partition. When you create the image you can save the image to this hidden partition so that let’s say that you do get that virus that wipes out the operating system and your system won’t boot – you can still restore your system.

The way you do that is turn on the machine and as it is powering up you hit the F11 key; there will be a little command that comes up that tells you, what to do then. Even before Windows starts, the F11 key turns on the Acronis Restore function. That function allows you to access the hidden partition, the Secure Zone.

You simply will get a window that looks very much like the window you would have within Microsoft Windows. It’s actually running a version of Linux at this point and you simply select Restore Image and you can tell it to “Restore the Image from the Secure Zone” or “From another location,” and then you simply reply, “Yes,” you want to restore that image and it will take that image and overwrite the hard disk.

Then you go back to that point in time when your system was working perfectly, before the virus existed. And the virus is simply wiped from your hard disk.

Alan: Well, let me tell you that F11 key is a lifesaver! There are times where Windows doesn’t boot; you can’t get into Windows to do anything as far as trying to find what’s keeping it from not booting. You just hit the F11 key and you have a full Program that’s also hidden in the Acronis Secure Zone and it allows us to do a lot of things, doesn’t it?

Stephen: It is actually a slimed-down version of Red Hat Linux, although if you’re looking at and you’ve never seen Linux before, you would have no idea that you were looking at Linux. It looks exactly like Windows and it gives you the options you need to get your system back up and running.

Alan: In using Secure Image Echo Workstation, can this be put on multiple computers so that we make sure that our whole network is backed up the way we want it?

Stephen: Acronis True Image Echo Workstation is designed to manage multiple computers and you do all of the management from a single system. Here’s the way it works: True Image Echo Workstation includes what we call an agent. It’s a small piece of code that you can put out on multiple machines.

Let’s say you have a business and you have 12 machines in your business. From a single system that has the full-blown version of True Image Echo Workstation, from that one system, you can identify each of the machines on your network and say, “Put an agent out on machine 1, machine 2, machine 3.” Each machine only has a small bit of code. You’re not putting the entire Application out there.

And then that one machine that has the full Application can then manage all of the machines on the network; you can set schedules and tell each machine when to back up; where to back up to; what commands you want to run before or after; whether or not you want to verify the image. All of that can be done from a single machine. And that single machine can be a laptop; it can be a desktop; it really doesn’t matter.

Alan: This is great, not only for a small business, but this is great for a household that has say, 2-3-or 4 computers, because if you are in a household with children, I guarantee you every kid in the household is going to have his own computer. And you need to make sure that they get backed up, because if you don’t you’re going to hear it from the kid basically say, “I lost my video! I lost my iTunes! Get it back for me!”

Stephen: It’s no longer that, “The dog ate my homework; now it’s the computer ate my homework.” If you have a backup image of that machine – guess what – the computer can restore that homework. I have multiple machines in my home; I have a network storage device on my network. It’s a hard disk that is simply connected to the network and that’s where I store all of the images from all of the machines.

Alan: Stephen, what are we looking at as far as the price of the new True Image Echo Workstation?

Stephen: The price of True Image Echo Workstation has been consistent now for several years. The base price for the Product, which includes the Management Console and the ability to image across networks; across domains is just $79.99.

The Add-on for the Universal Restore is an additional $29.99. You compare this power to our Home Product. Our Home Product lists for $49.99. It’s very competitively priced for somebody that has a home network. Even though we can it Echo Workstation and it is part of the corporate family, it still has the same look and feel as the Home Product.

Alan: If somebody would like to find more information about the Acronis True Image Echo Workstation and of course, information for all the other Back-up Software that you have on your Website, where would they go?

Stephen: You can visit us at http://www.acronis.com.

Alan: Stephen, we’ve run out of time. We didn’t even get a chance to talk about the new Restore features of True Image Echo Workstation and I’d love to have you come back again and talk about this, next time.

Stephen: Thanks so much for having me on the show. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you.