Acronis True Image Home 2009

Data backup and recovery are key issues regardless of the fact that your are a rookie or an advanced user. Acronis True Image is a viable backup solution: quick and stable.

The application includes wizards for backing up files, folders or entire partitions, recovery of hard disk contents or restoration of individual files, clone your hard disk drive by copying partitions to another hard disk or adding a new hard disk drive to your PC. With the featured tools you can plug images and assign drive letters so that you can browse them at your own will, check archives and view the application's logs. You can also choose between full, incremental or differential backup methods with password protection for your archives.

Besides the basic backup functions for the operating system you have the possibility to backup your music, video, and photos or the emails, contacts, signatures and any other information using the 'Application settings' backup feature. Another interesting and helpful feature is 'Explore backups' because you can easily search and recover particular files in archives just like in Windows Explorer.

If you want to backup you data on another computer located elsewhere you can use the 'Save to FTP' feature and if the work is done on your office computer while you are home, for example, an email can be sent to notify you when the backup is complete.

Pluses: Backup files can be stored on different partitions, network or you can create bootable media such as CDs, DVDs or USB Flash drives; in case of system crash you may restore backups from removable media or network. Tasks can be scheduled, so you needn't worry about manually updating your backups. There is the possibility to choose from four compression levels or split your archives so that they can fit on to CDs.

Besides, there are some nice feature you ca use to optimize your system as well: Acronis DriveCleanser helps you delete data from an entire partition or an entire hard drive beyond recovery, the File Shredder helps you delete securely files and folders, while System Clean-up deletes temporary and junk files from your computer.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: A reliable, full-featured imaging and data recovery application suitable for any type of backup job.

version reviewed: 11