Review: Acronis True Image Home 2009

Acronis True Image is best known for its ability to copy the entire contents of a notebook’s hard drive to a new, larger replacement hard drive. This is not an easy task to do “by hand” because notebook hard drives tend to have more complexity than desktop computer drives. True Image has traditionally had the smarts to know which partitions to grow and which to just copy.

The good news is that this process still works great. More good news is that there really is no bad news, but there are a few considerations. We’ll look at them, too.

And the equivalent screen shots from True Image Home 2009.

Remember that I mentioned that notebook hard drives tend to be more complex? The third image above shows the three partitions - one active, one service, and one specialized - that have to be backed up to get a true, restorable image of the hard drive on my ThinkPad. Because of the complexity of that layout, there are options in True Image Home 2009 that I'll elect not to use.

Perhaps because I have a background in OS/2 and Linux, I detest it when a program installs part of itself, requires a reboot, and then finishes installing. Yes, I know that it needed to install drivers and have them running to complete the install process, but this always strikes me as somewhat inelegant.

Other than that, though, the install went smoothly. The download is about 79.75 MB, and the installation, from first click on the executable through reboot and completion, takes less than fifteen minutes.

That the first choice during installation is to check for a newer version may strike one as a bit odd if the program was just downloaded, but since I’ve worked for two software companies that did “silent updates” without changing the program version upon occasion, I understand why this choice is there. It certainly doesn't hurt or delay the installation much, so it's worth doing.

True Image is all about wizards. These little helpers abound in the program, and just to get us started right, the installer announces itself as a wizard.

The license agreement is not objectionable. The only stipulation that will affect most of us is that, since it's a non-corporate license, any disk images created on the PC True Image is licensed to must only be used on that PC. This does not preclude creating an image on an external hard drive that will replace the hard drive in the PC itself, as this is a very major function of True Image. Nor does it limit the number of external devices you can create such hard disk images on, so this does not preclude backing up to multiple destinations or even to a network.

We get to see this True Image screen twice: once during the initial run, and again after the reboot.

And here's what it looks like at first run. What would you like to do?

The next step in the wizard is selecting whether you want to create a new backup archive, which you will on the first run, or add to an existing backup archive. Here's a minor point, but it defaults to creating a new backup on the C: drive under \Users\YourName\Documents even though it detected an almost empty external hard drive at startup. It's easy enough to click "Browse" and direct it to the external drive.

After progressing through the optional settings along the left-hand side of the wizard, the wizard offers a summary screen. Clicking "Proceed" starts the backup.

Here's what it looked like during the first backup. Although it's saying 41 minutes here, that actually dwindled down to about 27 minutes a couple of minutes later.

Incremental backups are much faster. After a day's use browsing, taking some screen shots, composing a little in Word, a bit of email, and some work in the GIMP, the incremental backup ran for only 1 min 48 seconds. That's pretty impressive.

Next: Disaster Recovery, File and Folder Recovery, Cloning a Hard Drive (Introduction), and our Conclusion