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A memory that comes back to haunt me from time to time concerns making a backup of important data.  Many an afternoon was passed trying to satisfy the voracious appetite of my chosen backup application as floppy disk after floppy disk was fed into the drive.  Those were the days when the standard media was 1.44MB 3.5" disks and you could bet if one of the disks was to throw up an error it would be one of the last in the series.  Now that type of situation is a distant memory with optical media being the standard and improvements in areas such as compression and verification with today’s backup software.

As its title suggest, Acronis True Image takes on the approach of making an exact backup image of your system that can be used to recover from a system crash.  Now up to version 8.0, Acronis True Image can be run on any Windows platform from 95 onwards and supports a wide range of storage devices.  These include floppy drives, hard disks, network drives, optical media, zip drives and other removable media.

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The True Image installation requires the user to enter a 25-character serial number that is found on the back of the CD envelope.  The installation routine offers to create a bootable disk or CD that can be used in an emergency.  The task can be carried out straight away or at a later date.  You will need to restart the computer to complete the installation of True Image.

The program’s opening menu divides its tasks into three sections covering Disk Imaging, New Disk Deployment, and Tasks which are displayed in a Windows XP Explorer-like interface.  Most of True Image’s work will probably be carried out in the Disk Imaging section.  It is here you will find options to create, restore, explore and update images.  The latter of these options will not become available until an image has been created and is available for updating by opting for an incremental backup whereby only files that has been altered will be included.

Acronis True Image takes a Wizard-led to complete its various procedures.  For example the Create Disk task is made up of steps to select the appropriate drive to be backed up; designate the destination drive; add a password if required; and append a comment to the image file.

When making an image you have a choice of different levels of compression to be applied.  The available choices are None, Normal, High and Maximum.  Whatever choice is made will have an effect on the required amount of storage space and time needed to complete the process.  On a test machine, the no compression option needed 40 minutes to write 2.541GB of data.  By opting for the highest level of compression, the storage space was reduced to 1.29GB but the time required was increased to one hour.  The other two settings needed 1.516GB and 1.32GB respectively with both taking 50 minutes to complete the task.

Any image created by the software can be viewed as if it was a virtual drive.  You can then inspect the content in order to carry out further action.  Other options in this section include the ability to restore an image or update one with an incremental backup.

While True Image’s main purpose will be to act as a backup solution, it can also be used as the means to transfer data from one location to another.  This will prove useful if you intend replacing a hard disk or moving data to another computer.  Tasks can be scheduled for action at specific times or at regular intervals.  A log feature lets you check on any actions that have been undertaken.

Although creating a backup could hardly be regarded as an appealing task, it can provide the safety net to avoid data loss.  Acronis True Image makes this task as easy as possible with its various Wizards.  With a price of £29.99, this product is well worth considering.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/