Sometimes it seems like with as useful as my computers are, we spend more time maintaining them than actually using them. Installing Anti-Virus, reg monitors and adware scanners, and backing up important information.

   Backups can eat up huge portions of our time, simply due to the quickly increasing amount of information that reside on our computers today. I have a keychain fob with twice the storage as my first PC, most new machines are coming with a minimum of 80 gigabytes of storage, and as much as 500 gigs or more. My main machine has over a Terabyte of drive space, and I know many people with far more than this on their home machines. Copying all this data to an external drive or burning to CD/DVD can take hours, even if it’s the portable type of data that can me moved around without consequence.

   Enter Acronis True Image 11 Home. This is a full-featured hard-disk copy and backup system, designed specifically with the home user in mind.

Acquisition and Installation

   Unlike our previously reviewed software products, Acronis TI is not free. However, sometimes you get what you pay for, even with software, so we’ll stay with it for now. On the Acronis website, True Image can be had for $49.99usd, and can be downloaded directly. Add another 13usd, and they’ll snailmail a copy of the CDROM. However, hop in the car and head to the store and you can grab it off the shelf for 50usd, which includes the documentation as well as the CDROM. Considering the 140 meg download, unless you’ve got a T-1 line or live out in the sticks, you’ll probably be time and money ahead getting it from Best Buy or Circuit City.

   However, even if you do buy the boxed version, Acronis urges users to visit their site afterwards to stay on top of security and technical updates. Updates are free of charge, but can be as large as the initial package. There is a free un-crippled 15 day trial version available for download, and you’re good to go so long as you’re using XP or Vista. Those last 5 people using Millennium Edition are out of luck. 

   The install goes well with the pro-quality installer interface. Very few options, I would have liked to have seen the ability to select how many and where the shortcuts were being placed, and where the program was being installed. The only thing I was given the option of changing was program components. There’s 2. One is True Image, the other is Rescue Media Builder. RMB is a sub-app that creates a boot disk for you to use if your machine won’t boot, and lets you restore from a backup. Why would you not want this?

Features and Use

   True Image 11 is a backup utility, sure, but I surmise that the blokes at Acronis guessed that many people would fail to get excited, so they upped the ante a little bit by including a couple other traditionally stand-alone tools.

   With today’s huge drives and people running multiple Operating Systems, creating separate partitions on them makes more and more sense. If one goes bad, you don’t have to wipe the whole drive, plus it makes organization of files that much simpler. True Image 11 is packed with a rather powerful partition manager. View, delete, and create partitions on your new hard disk.

   Also included are Drive Cleanser and File Shredder. Select a file, folder or drive, and SHRED it. Deletion options range from fast, which means some creep with a copy of “undelete.exe” won’t be able to recover it, to the Peter Gutmann method, which means that even those fools on CSI with the magic computers won’t have a chance. One problem here: While it was wiping the free space on my boot drive, it said “8 seconds remaining”….for 10 minutes. This bug came up in more than one component of True Image.

   Lastly, Try & Decide, which reminds me of SandBoxie, a little bit. TryDecide creates a super-secure virtual partition for you. You can browse the Internet or install programs using this virtual partition. If when you’re done with your web session or are finished with the tested program you decide that you didn’t like the changes that were made, TryDecide just wipes the virtual partition. If you are fine with the results of the session of installation, TryDecide will make the changes permanent for you.

   For those of you using Microsoft Outlook, TU11 comes with an Outlook setting backup utility, which if you ask me, seems kind of superfluous since we bought this thing for the purpose of backing up the entire freakin’ drive, eh? Genius. I think they stuffed the bra a bit much, if you ask me. Kinda like fixing the brakes then buying a new car.

Anyway….

Yes, I now have three 4.7 gigabyte files which represent the sum total of my C drive hanging out on the USB external waiting to be burned to DVD-r thanks to True Image. The operation could have been started in less than six clicks, but I opted to go through the variety of options. Backup can take some serious time, but Acronis helps you with this. You can either choose low data compression, fast write speed, and high priority provided you’re willing to go outside for a few minutes. I know, insane.

   I opted for door number two. High compression, low write speed, and low priority. The operation took a couple hours, but with those settings, I was able to continue using the computer with no interruptions. The only indication that such intense operations were taking place behind the scenes was the drive activity light flashing intermittently.

   Restoring an image or archive has options, too. If you still have full operating system access, you just run True Image and choose ‘restore’. You can then choose to do a full restore, or select specific files or folders from the archive to be retrieved, either to the original location or a new one.

   If your OS is borked, you can either run the rescue disk (which I highly recommend creating immediately upon installation of TU 11). It will prompt you through the recovery process. You can also arrange to have a ‘portable version’ of TU 11 installed on your backup media which will accomplish the same thing. Doesn’t take long, either. I tested this on an older Dell laptop, a box with a tad more grunt would likely be restored in 20 minutes or less.  

Uninstallation and System Friendliness

   One thing that has always irritated me is programs that I use on rare occasion deciding to install sub-apps that load with windows and sit in memory hogging my resources. To be fair, the processes that Acronis bestowed upon my system have a small footprint, but it’s the principle of the thing. Why would I want an applet that monitors for the presence of disk images for a program that I’m only going to use every couple of weeks? I could understand having a small app hanging around if you used the Backup Scheduler also included.

  That said, the over all memory usage wasn’t horrible, less than 80,000k when running, not ridiculous for a program of this depth. About 15,000k of it stays put when you close the application, but I digress.

  The uninstall from Add/Remove Programs was quick, but required a reboot, and left only 32K in a folder sitting in ‘My Documents’ as the sole reminder of its residence.

Wrap-up

Pros: Easy, unobtrusive peace of mind. Simple intuitive interface. File Shredder and Partition manager great additions.

Cons: Quit dropping crap in my memory! A couple pointless features. Time remaining bug.

[tags]backup, Acronis, True Image, Windows, Outlook[/tags]

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