Thread: Acronis True Image

THIS SOFTWARE PERFORMS more backup feats than any other drive-imaging
software. As with its peers, it creates images of whole drives, but it can also back up individual folders, e-mails, and program set- catch up with this kind of convenience, but don't bet on it. Microsoft includes an image backup feature in Vista, but not one that you'll want to use in a real-world system.

Like its commercial challengers, True Image creates full backup images of whole drives or individual partitions. It can also create regular incremental backups automatically so that you can restore your system to the state it was in when you made the last complete drive image or when you made any incremental backup. The utility creates and restores backups more slowly than Shadow Protect Desktop, but at a speed similar to that of Norton Ghost 12.0 and Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Personal Edi¬tion. I was impressed to see that True Image, like Paragon Personal, let me restore even my Windows system drive without requiring an emergency CD:
The utility rebooted, restored the system drive from the image, and then rebooted into the restored drive.

Snap Restore, a feature unique to True Image, reboots into Windows, instantly restores the files needed to run the system, and then restores the rest of the drive in the background. But the background activity slowed my system so badly that simply waiting for the ordinary restore process to complete and then getting back to work probably would have been faster.



True Image and Norton Ghost also let me back up e-mail from Outlook, Out¬look Express, and Windows Mail as well as folders, including My Documents. In addition, both allowed me to narrow backups to specific types of files. Fur¬thermore, each has a trigger feature that launches a backup whenever a user logs on or off the system or when a specified number of megabytes gets added to the hard drive. Ghost's trigger implementa¬tion is more flexible.

True Image let me choose to back up application settings. None of the other products I tested allowed me to do this. However, Acronis won't be ready to challenge Shadow Protect for our Editors' Choice until it focuses more on its core functions and less on the size of its feature set.