Acronis True Image Home 2010 Review Back Up Your System With Confidence
 Program Name: Acronis True Image Home 2010 Publisher: Acronis Inc. [ Official Website ] Windows XP SP3 Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Windows Vista SP2 (all editions) Windows 7 (all editions) Free Trial?: Free Scan Overall Score:   Download Now |
By H. Gordon
Top Pick!
Author's Note: I highly recommend Acronis True Image - it recently helped me to completely recover all the data from a hard drive that had completely broken down. My computer would not even load the bios. It made the process of recovering the data to a new hard drive incredibly easy and pain-free. Here's my review of the software tool that everyone should have on their PC.
Backing up your computer is one of the most important habits that you can have as a computer user. Hard drives are not perfect, and it's only a matter of time before the mechanical parts wear out and break, causing you to potentially lose an entire computer's worth of data. Other issues such as viruses and malware can also wreak havoc on your data.
If you're looking for a program that takes the guesswork out of creating simple, automated backups of your computer then look no further than Acronis True Image Home 2010 (main website | download). Personal experience has shown me what an excellent program this is - after my laptop suffered a complete hard drive failure, the backup I created with Acronis helped me completely restore my operating system and information.
Let's take a look at this program and see what it can do for you.
Interface Acronis True Image Home 2010 Review
Acronis True Image Home 2010 has a very easy to use interface. It is not cluttered and has very easy to read buttons and text descriptions. It's actually one of the more streamlined and easy to use backup programs I have encountered. Some programs will throw too many options in your face and can be overwhelming, but Acronis True Image has everything organized in such a way that creating and scheduling a specific backup or performing a recovery is incredibly simple.
The left sidebar has organized all the main elements of the program: Backup, Recovery, Tasks & Log, Try & Decide, and Tools & utilities. When one of these is selected the right area of the screen will display the further, more specific options you have, such as what elements you'd like to backup or how you want to schedule a backup of your documents.
Features Acronis True Image Home 2010 Review
Acronis True Image Home has a very extensive feature set when it comes to breaking down your data and keeping it safe.
At the highest level you are able to easily make an image of your entire hard disk or a specific partition. This is important when it comes to having a hard drive failure or other catastrophic even such as a virus infection. I strongly suggest making an entire image of your hard disk at least once every week or two weeks, and storing it on an external hard drive. It's a simple procedure and if your hard drive ever breaks (a more common occurance than you might think) you will never have to worry about spending thousands of dollars to recover your important data or programs and software.
You may also elect to make quick backups of specific files and folders, such as the My Documents folder. Acronis True Image also has a special feature where you can easily backup email files and address books for Microsoft mail clients.
Online Backups
Acronis offers a subscription based online backup service that allows you to store backups "off site," so you'll have a backup in case of a catastrophic event such as a fire or theft.
Non Stop Backup
Acronis Non Stop Backup offers near-CDP (continuous data protection) that makes backups of any changes every 5 minutes so that you can revert to a previous system state. This is extremely helpful in the event of accidental file deletion, malware or virus infection, or other disaster.
Try And Decide
This is a very cool feature that allows you to experiment within Windows without worrying about making harmful, permanent changes to your system. Basically this allows you to work in a "virtual" environment without having to actually create a virtual machine.
When you turn on Try and Decide you can load new drivers or programs and see how they work. If everything is fine, you can commit the changes to your operating system. If things seem to be getting gummed up, you can discard the changes and everything will be as it was before. You can also use this feature to download suspect attachments or visit questionable websites without having to worry about infecting your computer with viruses or malware.
One Click Backup
This feature makes it easy to create a backup scheme (such as an image of an entire partition) and simply and easily do it with one click. This takes the guesswork and hassle out of creating images.
Image Mounting
There are several very useful tools here that only increases the usability of Acronis. You can mount an image and explore it as a logical hard drive, meaning if you have have an image stored on an external hard drive such as a USB drive you can open and explore it from another computer. If your hard drive breaks or you are setting up a new computer you can easily mount an image and selectively move files to the new drive or computer without having to fully restore the image.
Disk Cloning
This feature will allow you to move your hard disk contents to a new hard drive, and resize partitions. Please ensure that you have made backups before doing this operation as sometimes moving to larger drives can be a sticky procedure.
Scheduling
Scheduling backups in Acronis True Image Home 2010 is incredibly easy and straightforward. You can make scheduled tasks for certain days of the month as well as weekly or bi-monthly on certain days, say the 5th and 15th of each month. You can further customize each procedure, for example have a weekly disk image and a daily backup of My Documents. Enabling a schedule will ensure that data loss from any disaster or problem is minimal. It's easy to forget to make backups and let it slide longer and longer!
Boot Disks
Making a boot disk will help you in the event that Windows will not boot or you have to start from scratch. If you buy Acronis online from a download you will have to make your own boot disk, meaning you must have access to a CD-RW drive and a blank CD.
Conclusion Acronis True Image Home Review
Acronis True Image Home 2010 is a stellar software tool that makes it very easy to ensure that you have all your important data backed up in the event of an emergency. If you're experienced with computers you know it's only a matter of time before some catastrophe happens, whether it's a hard drive failure, virus, or bad driver.
As I stated before, Acronis True Image was able to help me recover my entire system after my hard drive broke. Coincidentally I had just finished imaging my hard drive to an external USB drive when my computer started running slow. I decided to reboot, and upon restarting the computer my hard drive began clicking uncontrollably and the computer could not even load the bios. It was a complete mechanical failure within the drive. Had I not had an image of my disk I could have either lost all my data or paid for an extremely expensive procedure to recover information from the broken drive.
Fortunately I was able to simply install a new hard drive and boot Acronis and load the image onto the new drive. The procedure was painless and quick, and it's like it never even happened.
Based on experience I highly recommend this product to anyone looking for a secure and easy way to back up their data.
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