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A True Review

July 25, 2006

A True Review web site

Acronis True Image Backup Software

Other Tools

Some of us may only have one hard drive. Therefore, backing up to another hard drive can be difficult for you should never backup to a drive you are backing up. That is why Acronis includes Secure Zone. Secure Zone is a reserved part of the disk that Acronis hides. Then Acronis allows the user to backup to it; thus, not counting it as part of the backup/ restore process. The risk here is if the disk goes, the archive is lost as well.

Of course if scheduling Acronis to run, the user might want to see if there were any errors. This is where the logs feature comes in handy. Information is kept in a log and can be filtered by backup, errors, warnings and information prompts.

Disk Clone is a tool that can be used to transfer all data to a new hard drive. Since Acronis copies disks sector by sector for backups, it seems almost logical they would include a tool to allow the user to do this for their purposes too. If automatic is chosen, all the partitions are backed up. Partitions will be resized to fit the new disk as well.

To clone a partition or disk, select the old disk to clone. Hit next and select the new disk to clone. If doing a manual process click the disk to clone, then select which partition to clone. Select next and select the disk and partition where to clone it to. Using disk clone will destroy all partitions on the destination disk.

Performance

I backed up my C drive on my SATA raid to a USB 2.0 drive. It took just over an hour to back up the 36 GB of data with a medium compression. Compression resized the backup file to 27 GB. I then mounted the image as a new drive using the Mount Image feature. I copied files back and forth using the mounted backup. I am really impressed by this feature.

For restore, I decided to restore the whole disk. As you might have seen in the pictures, I have a SATA RAID, SCSI raid, USB drives and a standard PATA drive in my system. This makes for a great test with Acronis. I was able to use the restore media to access my drives and start the restore.

Issues

I noticed some issues with Acronis True Image. The first one was with old ATI Catalyst drivers. I had to upgrade to the newest drivers, 6.6 from 6.4. If I didn't, when I went to do a backup the software blue screened. I had the same issues when creating a media disk. Also, when creating a media disk, I got a blue screen with my AMI MegaRAID drivers. I had to go to LSILogic's site and download an older driver to create the media disk. Not many people will feel this pain though.

The last issue is the install process. If you do the Trial version, you will have to uninstall it, then install the purchased version. Don't ask me why, but it is kind of a pain.

Conclusion

Acronis is a smart choice for backup software. It is the only program I know of that can backup an entire disk, sector by sector while in Windows. We use Veritas at work for our server backups, but if we need to resize a partition or to grab an image, Acronis has proven to be a better tool. Added features like passwords, disk cloning, scheduling, and image mounting put Acronis over the top. I have a weird setup and always have issues with things, but Acronis handled most of it fine. My weird setup allows me to truly test the software.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Scheduling
• Bare metal backup and restore
• Easy installation
• Image mounting

Cons

• Need to upgrade ATI drivers
• Need to uninstall the trial first

Ratings

Overall:	Excellent
Backup:	Excellent
Restore:	Excellent
Price:	Excellent
Features:	Excellent
Compatibility:	Very Good

(Ratings Possible: Terrible, Very Bad, Bad, Fair, Good, Very Good, Excellent)