Review: Acronis True Image Home 2009 (Page 2 of 2)

The following image shows the "Protection State" immediately after running the first full backup. It's showing partial protection because an emergency boot disk has not been created and a "Startup Recovery Manager" has not been activated.

Here I had to get with the Help file and do some reading. My concern was that some of True Image's recovery features might interfere with the built-in Rescue and Recovery of my ThinkPad. Because of this, I did not allow True Image to install their Recovery Manager. This feature involves writing to the MBR or master boot record of the hard drive. This allows True Image to automate recovery, but I found that it also worked fine by booting from the Acronis boot disk, which I did allow it to create.

More specifically, the Startup Recovery Manager allows starting True Image before Windows starts. It does this by not only rewriting the MBR, but also through creating a "Secure Zone" on the hard drive. This is basically a hidden partition that can be used as a backup location. While I think this could be handy sometimes, it's not a good fit on my notebook. I don't want to give up the hard drive space, I don't want to change the MBR, and I'm using an external backup destination, anyway.

The boot disk starts a Linux loader and runs a Linux version of True Image. It had no problem starting the ThinkPad and it was easily pointed to the location of the backup files on my external pocket drive. Again, I was impressed by how nice it looked.

So recovery from an external drive works fine using the boot disk without the MBR alteration or secure zone.

I simply love this feature. A True Image backup file is actually a container. The program integrates seamlessly with Windows Explorer to give access to the backed-up files and folders within.

In the images below, I've navigated to F:/Backups and clicked on "MyBackup.tib." Then I drilled down to my user area and "Documents." It's just like following the same steps from C: drive, but I was looking at the files that I backed up yesterday.

Recovering a file or folder from the backup is as easy as dragging it out to the desktop, and this is so well integrated that you can use Vista's search function to find files within the container.

For this part of the review, we freshly formatted a 160 GB USB pocket drive to use to simulate cloning the ThinkPad's hard drive to a larger external drive. I consider this practice, as I plan to upgrade the hard drive in the ThinkPad very soon.

As mentioned previously, only the main C: drive partition needs to grow. The service partition and pre-desktop partition contain the ThinkPad's backup copy of Vista and the startable files necessary to run Rescue and Recovery.

True Image offers two cloning modes - automatic and manual. Automatic mode involves less clicking, but it grows all the partitions proportionally. Since we want to maximize the user partition only, we used the manual mode.

We'll follow up with a detailed tutorial on how to use True Image Home 2009 to clone a laptop hard drive to a bigger replacement drive. The tutorial is now up. Please see the link at the bottom of this page, but, as a preview, here are some screen shots taken during the cloning session.

Acronis True Image Home is a mature and capable application. In the 2009 version they have improved compatibility with Vista, both visually with the Vista Aero theme and in actual program use.

Also, we have only touched on what we consider the most important parts of the application here. There are other features and settings left for you to investigate.

Does True Image Home 2009 fulfill its promise as being an easy-to-use program for beginners and more experienced users alike?

Yes, I think so. The many wizards in the program organize setting up program tasks in a logical way with frequent and sufficient explanations for each step involved.

After the first backup (the "One-Touch" feature can quickly get you up and running with your first backup), scheduled backups should be set it and forget it. True Image will watch the storage space and rotate the backups as needed.

And they haven't messed with what the program was already great at - making a disk image for a new hard-drive - which, once again, went off without a hitch.

So, yes, we can recommend Acronis True Image Home 2009 both as a home backup solution, for all versions of Vista, and as a laptop hard drive cloning/copying utility.

Acronis True Image Home 2009 Homepage $49.99

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Links:

How to Clone a Notebook Hard Drive with Acronis True Image Home 2009 - Hard drive filling up and declining hard drive prices getting your attention? If you're ready to move up to a bigger hard drive for your laptop, this tutorial will show you step-by-step in pictures how it's done in Acronis True Image Home 2009.