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191
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ranked #173,025 most helpful out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★★
I must be dreaming, Acronis reality actually meets Acronis marketing hype!
True Image 2010 worked reliably for me, including 2 actual bootable hard-drive restorations. I've been using Acronis True Image in several versions over the years, and the previous 2009 edition was the nadir of their product line. For me at least, Acronis has redeemed themselves after the erratic and dangerous-to-your-data behavior of their last edition. Pros: Disk imaging for TOTAL disk restoration capabilities, full and incremental backup, selective directory/file type data backup, editing capability of the backup image, back-up image mounting as a logical drive for easy viewing and cut & paste from image to other drives with Windows Explorer, live backup (use computer while backing), recovery manager in conjunction with Acronis Secure Zone (restoration of operating system drive while still having use of computer), bootable CD with backup and recovery capabilities, bootable from image of disk. Cons: None that I could find so far. I am suspicious that uninstalling may be an issue, as it was in the past. Major improvements from the past: 1) The Try & Decide feature now works even if a reboot is required for the newly installed application or system change. The Acronis Try & Decide can truly undo a change in its entirety, even if critical files are over-written, something window's System Restore could never do. But, System Restore could survive a reboot, which in the past Acronis couldn't. Now, all situations are covered by True Image 2010, and I have been able to fearlessly change, upgrade, or install on my system and effortlessly reverse the changes if I don't like the results. 2) USB/multi-boot support is robust. In the past, forgetting to remove a flash drive while using True Image could result in dangerously wacky behavior such as corrupting the master boot record or deleting the C:\ drive. Having a complex computer system, say USB drives and multiple operating systems, was a recipe for disaster. Legacy FAT32 application software also clashed if the Acronis Secure Zone was installed. All these past issues appear to be resolved. I did a backup and fully-bootable disk-image restoration for a Windows XP/Windows 7RC-64-bit multi-boot system using an external USB 2.0 hard drive for storing the images, with other USB flash drives plugged in, and 2 internal SATA hard disks in 4 partitions. What I didn't test: I didn't make backups to DVD media; Acronis states it is possible make images spanning several DVDs. Other Thoughts: A reasonable person might wonder why anyone such as myself would give Acronis another chance after the problems of the recent past. There are 2 things about this addition of True Image that I find very valuable compared to other imaging software I've tried: 1) The Try & Decide feature was always useful, but with the improvement to survive reboots it's now the single most important feature for me; I like to try a lot of new configurations, and completely undoing experiments can be easily accomplished. 2) I have use of the computer while backing up, which makes it unobtrusive to do frequent backups. Backup speed on my system is about 3 gigabytes/minute, so a drive with 120 gigs of data took about 40 minutes to image (and I could still surf the net during the process). Restoring a drive goes at 3 gigs/minutes based upon compressed image size, so a 9 gig image took 3 minutes to restore to the uncompressed size of 20 gigs. Now, some general words of caution for would be users who are new to the disk imaging game. This type of software works with and independently from the host operating system. By its very nature it is a law unto itself, and the operating system can't really protect you from rogue behavior. The potential for trashing your system is very real. That's why I did extensive testing of True Image 2010 on a fully cloned system. I can't suggest strongly enough that BEFORE you install True Image to your computer's HD you should attempt to make a back up by simply using the bootable True Image CD in your optical drive. If you can't make a back up from the bootable CD, things may go badly should you choose to install True Image 2010 on your computer. Since this sofware interacts directly with the BIOS, be cautious about BIOS upgrades. Keep current with upgrades from Acronis. Finally, it's just a plain good idea to have partition management software (such as Acronis Disk Director or Active @ BootDisk) available for emergency use to recover deleted partitions. Sorry to make it all sound so scary, but any disk imaging software (acronis or not) is powerful stuff. And when things go wrong, the results can be quite bad. My system as tested: Dual boot Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit/Windows 7 RC 64-bit; Acronis True Image Home 2010 software installed to 64-bit Windows 7 RC partition; Acronis Secure Zone (FAT32) partition installed; Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard w/Intel P45 + ICH10R Chipset and Award BIOS version F7; Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 processor.
October 2009 · Software
the product in question
Acronis True Image Home 2010 [Old Version]
3.7★ · 206 ratings, as of 2023
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