Acronis True Image Backup

Brilliant, Versatile, Easy.
Powerful Backup That is Easy to Do!

Findings

If you're looking for a backup solution, this is it. Acronis True Image for the home, home office, small business or the enterprise will cater for all your needs. Besides the usually file and folder backup and restoration capabilities, it can also backup and restore the entire "image" of your computer or just individual partitions, whatever you want!

Acronis True Image is very versatile as it can backup to many different mediums such as, but not limited to, hard disk drives (networked, USB, SCSI, IDE, SATA, Firewire, basic drives, dynamic drives), CDs, DVDs, USB flash drives and a large range of formats of magnetic tapes.

Please note that backing up any more than 2GB of data to a USB flash drive will take a frustratingly long time. Therefore, regular back-ups of more than 2GB of data, I recommend you backup to any type of hard disk drive, such as an external USB hard disk drive, or a magnetic tape.

For the more advanced users, and businesses, I recommend the Echo edition over the Home edition. The Echo edition allows you to purchase the optional plug-in license, Acronis Universal Restore, which will let you restore your backed-up computer image to any other computer regardless of the different hardware inside it. The benefit to Acronis Universal Restore is to avoid having to re-install and re-configure all your software and custom settings. This will be handy to have if you ever upgrade or replace your existing computer's mainboard or migrate to a new computer or laptop. Without Acronis Universal Restore, you can't restore your backed-up computer image to a computer that has indifferent hardware.

Selecting the right Acronis solution for you

First of all, the various editions available are:

• Acronis True Image Home;
• Acronis True Image Echo Workstation;
• Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server;
• Acronis True Image Echo Server for Windows; and
• Acronis True Image Echo Server for Linux.

Basically, if you are a home user, or want to backup a single computer or laptop that's running a workstation operating system like Windows XP or Vista, then I recommend Acronis True Image Home. However, you may want to visit the Acronis website to compare the features between the Home and Echo Workstation editions.

Otherwise I recommend the Acronis True Image Echo family of products. Depending on your exact requirements, you may need to purchase one or more of the Echo edition products. For example, you will probably need to purchase Echo Workstation for the majority of your networked computers, plus Echo Enterprise Server or Echo Server to backup a computer running a server operating system like Windows Server 2003. Due to the large number of features, please visit the Acronis website to view the Echo edition feature comparison chart to determine precisely which Echo edition(s) you need.

NOTE: The following list of features applies to the Home edition, which doesn't allow the optional plug-in Acronis Universal Restore. Please check the feature comparison charts using the links above to determine which edition is right for you.

Backup Features

Acronis True Image Home provides the maximum flexibility to ensure you are adequately protected and can recover from unforeseen events such as viruses infections, unstable software downloads, and hard drive failures. Create an exact copy or "image" of your computer or laptop for a full backup or backup only your important data and application settings  - it's your choice!

• Backup your entire PC or laptop.
  Acronis True Image includes a patented disk imaging backup technology. You can copy your entire PC or laptop, including the operating system, applications, user settings, and all data. In the event of a system or disk crash, virus attack or other fatal failures you can restore the entire disk contents in minutes - no reinstallations required!
• Backup your system state.
  Protect your registry, boot files, as well as important system files from system crashes.
• Set and forget.
  Configure it once and you don’t have to care about your backups as long as traffic light indicator shows green.
• Scheduling.
  Start backup on user idle, login/logout, at a specific time or date, or other events. No need to remember to run backups on a regular basis; you can have the software do it automatically.
• Schedule periodic backup validation.
  Check your backups are not corrupt to ensure the restore process will succeed.
• Automatic catalogue of all your backups.
  Easily locate your archives - the system automatically remembers their placement.
• Backup your documents, music, video, photos, and e-mails.
  Protect your digital memories from a fatal system failure. Unlike traditional printed pictures or music CDs if your PC crashes, those memories could be lost forever without Acronis True Image.
• Backup Microsoft Outlook.
  Preserve your emails, contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, signatures, news folders, e-mail rules and user settings with just a few mouse clicks!
• Try&Decide™.
  Create a temporary, safe place on your hard disk where you can perform changes to your system that otherwise might not be advisable, such as installing new software, downloading files from the Internet, or opening e-mail attachments. If the operations are successful, you can apply those changes to the real system or discard the changes as you wish.
• Exclude Files and Folders from Image Backup.
  Save space when creating backups by ensuring that you are not backing up the information you don’t want to keep.
• Quick backup.
  Initiate backup of selected files from Windows Explorer directly, without starting the Acronis True Image application first.
• Create incremental and differential backups.
  Faster backups by only capturing changes since the last backup or the last full backup.
• Perform live backups.
  Keep being productive by using your PC or laptop during backups.
• Backup application settings and avoid the time consuming process of reconfiguring your custom settings. For the following applications:
  Productivity tools: Microsoft Office 2000/XP/2003/2007, ABBYY FineReader 8 and more;
  Email: Microsoft Outlook (including the IMAP folder on the server), Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5, The Bat! 3 Home and more;
  Browsers: Internet Explorer 6.0 SP2/7.0, Mozilla Firefox 1.5/2.0, Opera 9 and more;
  Security: Norton Internet Security 2007, NOD32, Spyware Doctor 4.0, Zone Alarm 6.5, F-Secure Internet Security 2007, Outpost Firewall 3.5 and more;
  Audio and Video Applications: Windows Media Player 10/11, iTunes 6/7, QuickTime 7, RealPlayer 10.5, Winamp 5.0 and more;
  Instant Messaging: Windows Live Messenger 8.0, Yahoo Messenger 8.0, AOL Instant Messenger 1.2, ICQ 5.1/6.0, Skype 2.5/3.0 and more;
  Digital Photography: Corel Paint Shop Pro X 10, Adobe Photoshop CS/CS2/CS3, 3D Studio Max 8/9, ACDSee 8.0 and more;
  Utilities and Drivers: WinZip 10/11, WinRar 3, Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0/8.0, Alcohol 120% 1.9, Nero 7.0-7.7, FlashGet 1.7/1.8, RegGet Deluxe 4.2 and more;
  Developer Tools: Microsoft Visual Studio 2003/2005, Macromedia Dreamweaver 8/CS3 and more.
• Create backup archive rules.
  Ensure that you never run out of space by setting limits on the amount of space allocated for backups, the number of backups and the amount of time you keep backups. The application will automatically manage backups and provide space for new backups.
• Backup policies.
  Schedule backup tasks that will backup all data, data changes against the previous backup or data changes against the initial backup (i.e. perform full, incremental or differential backup) in a desired order.
• Email notification.
  Peace of mind by receiving notification that your backups have completed.

Recovery Features

Acronis True Image Home allows you to recover what you need, be it your entire system, an important file, or your application settings. With our recovery choices you will be back to work in no time!

• Restore your entire PC from an image.
  Avoid the time-consuming task of locating all your application CDs and registration codes, and then reinstalling and reconfiguring all your programs.
• Message-level Outlook restore.
  Quickly locate and recover your important messages from Outlook mail backup.
• Search and explore archives.
  Easily search for and recover particular files from all your known backup archives.
• Preserve files and folders during restore.
  Make sure your latest work isn't overwritten by recovering from an older backup.
• Restore specific files.
  Quickly recover important documents from your backup archives.
• Restore application settings.
  Avoid the hassle of customizing your applications again in case of failure.
• Explore archives.
  Easily search and recover particular files in archives just like in Windows Explorer.
• Acronis Active Restore™.
  Use your system while your PC is being restored.
• Acronis Recovery Manager™.
  Boot your computer to start the recovery process without boot media by selecting the F11 key, even if your operating system has failed.

Privacy Features

Acronis True Image Home provides a number of features that enhance your privacy protection. All of the features and capabilities of the award-winning Acronis Drive Cleanser.

The Cleanser product has been incorporated into Acronis True Image Home, providing you with extremely powerful and easy-to-use data security that will enable you to prevent data and identity theft.

• Acronis Drive Cleanser.
  Protect your sensitive data when you are discarding a hard drive or returning a leased system by securely erasing the whole hard drive.
• File Shredder.
  Wipe private or confidential data in individual files using latest multi-pass algorithms.
• System Clean-Up.
  Protect your privacy by cleaning up your activity tracks stored by Microsoft Windows.

Storage Media Features

Acronis True Image Home provides a wide variety of storage options for your backups allowing you to use existing resources or new ones.

• Flexibility to store your backups where you want to. Supports the following storage types:
  
  • FTP;
  • Hard disk drives i.e. P-ATA (IDE), S-ATA, SCSI, SAS, IEEE1394 (Firewire) and USB 1.0 /2.0 drives;
  • Networked storage devices;
  • CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW;
  • ZIP®, Jaz® and other removable media;
  • USB flash drives & PC card storage devices.
• Acronis Secure Zone.
  No need to purchase an extra hard drive, CDs, or DVDs to protect data because you can save data to a special hidden partition on your hard drive.
• Password protect the Acronis Secure Zone.
  Peace of mind knowing that only authorized users can access the Acronis Secure Zone.

Compatibility

Acronis True Image Home is the easiest, the most convenient and intuitive disk imaging, backup and system restore software you've ever seen. Its automated, wizard-driven operations make backup and restoration simple even for a novice.

The following operating systems are supported:

• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4 installed.
• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 installed.
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional 64-bit Edition.
• Microsoft Windows Vista (all editions).
• Acronis True Image Home also enables the creation of a bootable diskette or CD-R/W that can back up and restore a disk/partition on a computer running any Intel- or AMD- based PC operating system, including Linux. The only exception is the Intel-based Apple Macintosh, which is not supported in native mode at this time.

The following file systems are supported:

• FAT16, FAT32.
• NTFS.
• Linux Ext2, Ext3.
• ReiserFS.
• Linux SWAP.
• If a file system is not supported or is corrupted, Acronis True Image Home can copy data using a sector-by-sector approach.

To buy Acronis True Image as a downloadable purchase only, visit the Acronis website and purchase online. If you'd prefer to pay a little more to receive a physical product, then contact me with your purchase request.