Epinions.com March 21, 2004 by nc10 Original on the Epinions.com
Acronis True Image 7 — State of the Art Hard Disk Backup Software
Rating: 4/5
Acronis True Image 7 is a disk imaging software utility that's designed to create reliable and complete backup images (including temp files, windows settings, patches) of complete hard disks or individual partitions on a hard disk. These images can be stored on another internal or external hard drive or sent to recordable cd or dvd writers. Disk Imaging backup software has evolved, adding features over the last few years, with Symantec's Ghost and Drive Image being perhaps the best know programs, but Acronis has led the evolution recently, with Acronis True Image 6 being the first of these three programs that was able to back up your boot drive without booting to DOS. Acronis True Image 7 builds on that version by offering the following key features: — Create backup images for any partition or complete drive from Windows or DOS — Automated backup — Incremental backups — Image verification — Able to "mount" an image as a "virtual drive"and restore files or directories — Clone or upgrade/replace disk drives — Supports Firewire and USB drives Acronis True Image supports Windows operating systems for the PC, from Win 95 to Windows XP. Drives on PC's running other operating systems OS/2, Linux, Windows 3.X, etc can still be backed up, though its done by booting the PC with an Acronis Rescue disk, which launches a Linux version of the software. The Low Level Formatting of a hard disk lays out the tracks and sectors on a hard disk. A track is a "ring" of data around a disk. Each disk has many tracks. Each track is broken up into several segments called "sectors". Disk Imaging backup software backs up your hard drive on a "sector by sector" basis, rather than on a "file by file" basis, creating an exact image of your hard drive, including file allocation tables, boot records, hidden system files and other information that you might not get if you manually copied all of the files on your hard disk. If you have an image of your hard disk, its easy to restore your sytem even if you've lost your boot drive. Restoring the image creates a bootable drive ready to run Windows with all of the updates, drivers, patches, and other information that were in place when you created the image. In addition to providing a backup for disaster recovery, many PC owners use imaging software to reinstall Windows routinely. Frequently software and hardware installations leave registry settings, system files and other clutter even after they are removed, each slowing down Windows slightly. Computer users find themselves needing to reinstal Windows to clear out this clutter. If you;ve made an image of your last good install, along with an incremental image of your current system, its fairly easy to get Windows up and running again using the "last good install image" and then pull the important data you need from the "current system" back up
InstallationAcronis True Image 7 is available for $50 from the Acronis website, either as a download, or for the boxed version (shipping is extra). I downloaded the latest version (7.0, build 597), and installed it on my computer without problems. During the install process, you'll be asked to provide a 25 chararcter registration key, and to create a bootable recovery cd or bootable set of recovery diskettes. I created a bootable cd during the install process. Most computers can boot from the cdrom drive, either by changing the "boot from" settings in the bios, or pressing a key (F12 on my Dell) during the boot up process , which takes you to boot drive selection menu. I installed Acronis True Image on a Dell 4550 PC running Windows XP. The bootable cd includes a Linux version of Acronis True Image to help you get your PC back up and running if you've lost the drive that your Acronis software was installed on, allowing you to access and restore images stored on other hard drives or writeable DVD's or CD's. The Linux version can also be used to create backup images, and even supports firewire and USB connected drives, but has one limitation pointed out by an Acronis representative... The downside — in Windows, we can perform compression that lets us back up only those sectors with data. When you boot from the rescue disk, we image every sector, regardless of whether it has data.
Using Acronis True Image Launching Acronis True Image opens a very clean intuitive interface, offering the standard Windows menu and toolbar, and an Explorer like interface split into two sections. In the right section are operating icons, listed in three categories, Disk Imaging, New Disk Deployment, and Tasks. On the left is shown a short description of each icon as it is selected, along with a Tools menu to access controls to some of the other tools for optimizing how disk images are saved and used.
Disk ImagingClicking on the Create Image icon launches a Wizard Interface to walk you through the image creation steps. — Select the drive or partition to back up — Drives are clearly labeled by name, along with size, free space, and type of formatting (NTFS, FAT32, etc.). — Select the partition to write the backup to — This option presents an Explorer like view of the drives on your system, where you can chose any hard disk or removable drive to write your image file(s) to, including network drives, and the Acronis Secure Zone. (Acronis True Image optionally creates a hidden area on your hard disk, called the Acronis Secure Zone, for storing secure backup images.) You can also chose to "append changes incrementally to existing backup". Incremenatal backups is a relatively new feature in disk imaging software, but is much appreciated. Acronis True Image creates an imcremental image which only contains sectors which have changed since the last image was created. Both images, the original and the incremental, are needed to restore your hard drive. This software will write image files to cd's or dvd's. Writeable DVD's must be formatted with packet writing/UDF software (Roxio's DirectCD or Ahead's InCD, among others). Formatting is not needed for CDR/RW's. Acronis plans to implement direct recording to unformatted DVD's in the future. — Select what size image files you want to create — If you intend to save your back up images to to cdr's or dvd rewriteables, you might want to save your image file to a hard disk first, in 650mb increments, and then burn them to cd later as you have time, rather than sit through the back up process inserting cd's as needed. Select Compression level — Choices are none, minimal, normal and maximum. In my case normal compression compressed a partition's size by about 35–45%, depending how much "uncompressible" data (image, mp3, mpg files) was present on the original files. Using High compression required about 50% more time to create image files, though the image file was slightly smaller than when normal compression was used. (A highly compressed image of my new boot drive containing 7.28 Gb of data was 3.82 Gb, while the "normally" compressed version was 3.88 Gb. High compression might be worthwhile if you were burning to cd's or dvd's. Set Passwords and Provide Comments — You can password protect image files or leave large text descriptions, useful if you have several backup images saved. The last screen summarizes your choices, prior to creating the image. Acronis True Image is reasonably quick. I recently decided to install a new 120 Gb hard drive on my computer, which had a 30 Gb boot drive and 80 Gb data drive, and reinstall Windows on the new 120 Gb drive. I used this opportunity to put this backup program through its paces. The boot drive still worked, but I had a lot of problems with the Windows installation. All cd's look like writeables when first loaded (right clicking on properties allows me to read them), I couldn't install some software as often InstallShield installers reported errors, javascript didn't work right, I couldn't even click on the javascript buttons on Microsoft's website to download Windows updates, and Activesync, which I used to sync my PocketPC was acting strangely. In this case, I wasn't able to create an image of this drive directly from within my corrupted Windows install using Acronis True Image, but after I reinstalled Windows on the new 120 Gb drive in a 45 Gb boot partition, I was able to put my old boot drive in my computer and make a backup from the new vesion of windows. Only 30 minutes were required to make a back up image of this drive, which contained 20 Gb of data, and save it to a second partition on my new hard drive. The 20 Gb image file was compressed and required only 13 Gb of disk space using the "normal" compression setting. I then removed the 30 Gb drive and reconnected my 80 Gb data drive. After reinstalling Windows on the new drive, along with a few key applications (Outlook, ActiveSync, Word, Acronis True Image, Netscape, Quicken, Firewall and AV software, and a few other programs I used daily) I created a backup image and also saved it to the 80gb drive on my system. In this case, the original hard disk partition contained 7.3 Gb of data, and the 3.9 Gb image file was created in 12 minutes using normal compression. Restore Image — (Note: If you end up losing your boot drive, you'll likely be restoring it with a the Acronis boot disk you created when installing this software or by launching Acronis True Image from the Secure Zone than running Windows version.) This icon launches a Wizard that walks you through the restoration process, very similar to the image creation process described above. If you've created incremental backups, you'll be able to select the original backup image or restore an image at the time the incremental backup was made. You can restore more than one partition at at time, change file systems (FAT16 to FAT32, for example), change partition type (set a partition primary and/or active), and most importantly, resize a partition on the new drive to fit or be larger than the restored partition. Explore Image — This wizard walks you though installing a "virtual drive" on your PC and then restoring an image file to that virtual drive. A virtual drive looks just like a real drive in Windows explorer, and you can copy (restore) files from the virtual drive just like any others. Creating a virtual drive takes a few seconds, after which a new drive will show in Windows Explorer, a virtual representation of the partition contained in the image file, from which you can restore any file that was in the original image. Unfortunately, Acronis True Image can only load "virtual drives" from image files on a hard drive., and not from image files on cd's or dvd's. This means if you want to restore an individual file from an image file on cd or dvd, you'll need to copy all of the cd's back to a hard disk first.
New Disk DeploymentThe Add New Disk icon launches a wizard which helps you set up the partitions on a new hard disk. This wizard is intuitive and works well, I used it to split my new 120 Gb into two partitions, 45 Gb and 75 Gb, in just a few minutes. The Disk Clone icon launches a wizard which walks users through the process of copying partitions from one hard drive to another. This is useful if you are replacing a working drive on your system with a new, typically larger, version. Acronis True Image will automatically size the partitions on the new disk, proportional to the original disk, or allow you to resize the partitions to suit your needs.
Tasks (Scheduling Automatic Backups)This wizard works very much like the create image wizard, except, the final step allows you to choose to create backup images (incremental or complete) on a highly flexible schedule, daily, weekly, monthly, whenever the computer starts (each start or one start per day), and the time and day of week for recurring startups. For example, I've scheduled backups to be made incrementally every 2nd week on Tuesday nights.
Other Tools and OptionsTo test whether on not Acronis True Image would really work if I ever lost my hard drive, I created an image of my new boot drive and burned it to a UDF formatted (by DirectCD) DVD. I then installed an old 20 Gb hard drive as the only hard drive in my computer, and booted it up with a bootable Acronis True Image Recovery DVD that I had created when I installed this software. I pressed F12 during the boot up process and selected the "boot from CD ROM drive" option offered by my system's bios. My computer started as expected, and loaded a Linux version of Acronis True Image. The interface looked very similar to the windows version, though in blocky graphics (probably in 640x480 resolution) reminiscent of a DOS program. I then asked Acronis True Image to restore the 7.3 Gb of data from my new boot drive to the 20 Gb drive, resizing the original partition it to fit on the 20 Gb drive. The complete process required about 30 minutes. When I shut down the software, my computer rebooted, this time from the 20 Gb drive, into windows, without a hitch. Writing a backup image to cd's or dvd's might provide the most secure backups, Acronis provides a mechanism to optimize security and safety of backup images saved to hard drives, covering just about everything short of mechanical hard drive failure. Acronis True Image will optionally create an Acronis Secure Zone on one of your hard drives. This zone will be not be accessible from any Windows application or the operating system, minimizing the chance it will be corrupted by Windows, other users, or a Virus. I setup a 20 Gb Secure Zone on my new hard drive. After completing the "create a secure zone wizard", my computer rebooted, and the second partition on my new hard drive was 20 Gb smaller (now in the hidden "Secure Zone"). As expected, when I launched Acronis True Image, a new location for storing backup images was available, the "Acronis Secure Zone". You can also boot your computer from the Secure Zone, by pressing F11 during startup. This launches the Linux version of Acronis True Image, very similar to the Windows version, from which you can restore images from the Secure Zone, or other hard disk partitions, or from cd's and DVD's. Saving images to a Secure Zone maximizes the chances that it will be there when you eventually need it.
Technical Support and Final CommentsFree technical Support is by email only, and Acronis seems to take 2–3 days to answer emails. (I sent several messages requesting help trying to backup my corrupted version of Windows). Questions are answered directly, no form letter replies. (Acronis offers a paid Priority support option also.) I do wish Acronis offered a user board where we could see other questions and answers. Software updates are available for registered users. Acronis True Image has gone though at least a couple of "builds" in the first month that I've used it, a good sign that Acronis is aggressively supporting the product. The help files are PDF files, clicking on help within Acronis True Image launches Acrobat to read these files. The help files are very well written, with plenty of images walking you through each part of the software. I like Acronis True Image a lot. I've also used both of Symantec's Disk Imaging products, Ghost and Drive Image, and I'd give the edge to Acronis True Image. It's a little easier to use and offers more features at a lower list price. You can run and use Acronis True Image without ever leaving Windows, and the wizard interfaces walk you through every step of every process. It is also reasonably fast. Incremental and scheduled backups are very nicely and effectively implemented. I'm hoping Acronis is very successful with this product and continues to offer and develop more utitilities for PC users, making our life a little easier.
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