New "health check" helps identify disk problems ahead of time
to protect your PCs and servers from failure
Woburn, Mass., June 10, 2010 - Acronis, a
provider of easy-to-use backup, disaster recovery and security
solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today
announced the release of a new free disk monitoring tool for
businesses and consumers alike, Acronis® Drive
Monitor™.
Acronis Drive Monitoris a free, downloadable software
application that monitors the health of server, PC and laptop hard
disk drives. It helps to alert users to problems that may indicate
an imminent failure and in doing so gives users time to react by
saving the data contained on their hard drive and allowing them to
arrange for replacements.
"Data is important whether it's at your home or office," said
Jason Donahue, CEO of Acronis. "Unfortunately hard drives fail
every day which is why Acronis has developed Acronis Drive Monitor
as a free tool for the community at large. It can help predict when
a hard drive is about to fail, giving you the chance to back up
your data before disaster strikes. No one should be without it
which is why we are offering it as a free tool."
When Acronis Drive Monitor identifies a problem, it generates an
email or onscreen alert describing the specific finding. It offers
a simple and easy to understand explanation of the alert guiding
the user to the steps they need to take to remedy the issue. A
color coded summary provides an overview of the disk's health at a
glance and weekly reports summarize the findings.
"It works! It told me my 320GB hard drive was about to fail. I
started backups immediately," said Allan E. Levy, a beta tester
from North Potomac, Maryland. "The next day, my drive began to fail
and the partition with the OS was destroyed. But thanks to Acronis
Drive Monitor, I had a fresh backup before my hard drive
crashed."
Acronis Drive Monitor observes operating system health, checks
the last backup date, and evaluates disk performance data generated
by most disk drives via a disk-resident monitoring function called
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology).
Acronis also supports other storage devices such as non-S.M.A.R.T.
compatible RAID systems via scripts. Further, Acronis Drive Monitor
also monitors messages in the Windows event log that indicate that
data may be in danger.
Acronis Drive Monitor is integrated with the current versions of
Acronis home and business backup and recovery products. Users of
Acronis® Backup & Recovery™ 10 business
software, Acronis® True Image Home 2010 and Acronis®
Backup and Security 2010 home PC software can take advantage of
Acronis Drive Monitor's ability to trigger an immediate, automated
backup of any disk that shows signs of imminent failure. It also
notifies users if a backup has not been performed.
Acronis Drive Monitor works on most Windows PCs, workstations or
servers to check for disk-related OS events, file system errors,
and negative changes in S.M.A.R.T.-monitored disk functions like
throughput, spin-up time and seek error rates.
"We built this free tool with the help of the IT community and
we'll support it exclusively through our online Support Forums and
Knowledge Base. Plus, we will use feedback from users to develop
new features and capabilities as this tool becomes an integral part
of their system maintenance," said Donahue.
Acronis Disk Monitor is a free tool available to everyone. To
download, go to: https://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/drive-monitor/.
About Acronis:
Acronis is a leader in AI-native cyber protection, unifying data protection, cybersecurity, IT operations and hybrid infrastructure to deliver business continuity, security and compliance with less cost and complexity. More than 21,000 service providers trust Acronis to protect over 750,000 businesses in 150 countries. Acronis is headquartered in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. For more information, visit www.acronis.com.