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Golden Triangle PC Club October, 2007
by Dale Farris, Reviews Coordinator Original article at Golden Triangle PC Club web site
Acronis True Image 11 Home
Acronis True Image 11 is the complete disk imaging, system disk backup, and bare-metal restore for workstations and home PCs. Acronis True Image 11 Home provides the maximum flexibility to ensure you are adequately protected and can recover from unforeseen events such as viruses, unstable software downloads, and hard drive failures. Create an exact copy of your PC for a full backup or backup only your important data — your choice. Acronis True Image allows you to create an exact disk image for complete system backup and disk cloning, providing the most comprehensive data protection. The disk backup file contains the exact copy of a hard disk, including all the computer data, operating system, and programs. After a system crash you can restore the entire system, or simply replace lost files and folders from your disk backup. Acronis True Image 11 Home also allows you to create a bootable CD that can backup and restore a disk / partition on a computer running any PC-based operating system, including Linux. Based on the exclusive Acronis Drive Snapshot disk imaging technology, Acronis True Image allows you to create an online system disk backup without reboot to keep the system productive. The product provides the fastest bare-metal restore that dramatically reduces downtime and IT costs.
Acronis True Image 11 Allows You to:Restore separate files and folders even if there is no need to restore a whole partition or disk Restore a data partition under Windows, as well as unplugging and re-connecting a logical drive when/where necessary Restore a system partition under Windows, rebooting the PC when necessary, or booting with a bootable diskette or CD-RW before the operating system loads These features in Acronis True Image 11 guarantee that your valuable data will not be lost — under any circumstance — while allowing you to restore your system even under the most serious system failure or disk malfunction. - Create an exact copy of your PC for a full backup
- Backup and restore your music, video, and data
- Backup your e-mails and Outlook data and settings
Try & Decide
Easy rollback of system changes Protect your PC application configuration settings Schedule backups automatically by time or system events
New Features in V. 11- Supports Microsoft Windows Vista
- Supports 64-bit CPU
- Quick backup of specific files
- Backup data in specific categories
- Explore backups
- Create backup rules
- Email notifications
- Save to FTP
Reduce your disk backup time and storage by excluding paging and hibernate files from the disk backup image Manage your PC performance by changing the disk imaging process priority Verify disk backup image before a restore Check the file system after a restore Try&Decide utility — This feature allows you to create a temporary copy of your hard disk. Using this copy, you can perform changes on the system that otherwise might not be advisable, such as installing new software, downloading files from the Internet, or opening e-mail attachments. If the operations on the virtual version of your system are successful, you can apply those changes to the real system or discard the changes as you wish. If, during these operations, the system crashes or is infected by a virus, you can delete the temporary duplicate and restore your system to a known, healthy condition. A simple reboot will restore your original hard disk and any changes, including the virus or other unwanted changes, will be gone. DriveCleanser, File Shredder, and System Clean-up – Securely wipe data stored on an entire hard disk, individual partitions or in individual files and eliminate traces of user system activities. You have the option to delete files or erase a whole disk using any of eight standardized data destruction methods or custom, user-defined methods. This capability comes from the inclusion of Acronis DriveCleanser, a former stand-alone product that also was a component of the Acronis Privacy Expert Suite. As a stand-alone product, Acronis DriveCleanser won several Editors' Choice Awards. Flexible and powerful scheduler with more settings – A new scheduler allows you to schedule tasks for backups and validations with more flexibility. Additional settings greatly enhance usage options. New settings include: set schedule on logon/logoff, Windows start up, when added or deleted data exceeds a specified amount, or after a specified amount of time. Also you can setup to start a backup if your computer is in an idle state, so the backup will be performed without affecting your productivity. More user-friendly – Many interface improvements and usability enhancements make Acronis True Image Home easier to use than ever before. Acronis True Image Home is packaged as a suite of smaller, simpler, independent utilities working together and it is ready to protect the computer right after installation, no reboot is necessary. Sector-by-sector images – You can create an exact sector-by-sector disk image. This feature is very useful when you need to backup corrupted disk drives or to make an image of a partition on which an important file has been deleted. This option lets you copy used and unused hard disk sectors. Ignore bad sectors – This option lets you run a backup even if there are bad sectors on the hard disk. This feature is also useful during unattended backups when you cannot control the backup process. If you enable this option, the backup will be preformed regardless of read and/or write errors that could occur on the bad sectors. Silent Mode – You can configure the program to ignore errors during backup/restore operations. In this mode, no notifications will be displayed if errors occur while backup or restore task is running. Instead, you can view the detailed log of all operations after the task is complete. Searching for a file in an image – You can search for a files in an image by name or a part of the name and then restore individual files easily and quickly. Browsing all backup locations with file search and drill-down to the file level – You can search for a file through multiple archives and backup locations by name or by a part of the name and then restore individual files easily and quickly. Restoring files and folders without restoring the absolute path – You can select an option of restoring files without restoring the absolute path so the restored items will be saved to the destination folder without creating multiple additional folders. Shell extension for archive validation – You can easily validate any archive right from the Windows Explorer context menu. Simply find a backup archive, right-click on it and select "Validate Backup Archive".
Key Features:- Create an exact copy of your PC for a full backup
- Backup and restore your music, video, and data
- Backup your e-mails and Outlook data and settings
- Try & Decide: easy rollback of system changes
- Protect your PC application configuration settings
- Schedule backups automatically by time or system events
- Complete image or incremental backup capabilities
- Fastest bare-metal restore for workstations and stand-alone PCs
- Scheduling of system imaging
- Support for all Windows workstation operating systems
- Support for all Windows files systems: FAT 16, FAT 32, and NTFS
- Support for non-Windows operating systems including Linux and NetWare
- Support for high-speed, high-performance storage devices
- Full support for all RAID configurations both IDE and SCSI
- Acronis Secure Zone
- Acronis Startup Recovery Manager
- Works solely within the Windows environment
- Drive cloning
- Migration of data from an old drive to a new drive
- Redeployment of a hard drive as a data disk or a system disk
- Stores only the necessary disk sector contents
- User-defined compression levels
- Multivolume archives
- Password protection
- Support for hard disks of any size
- Changes partition type, file system, size, and disk location
There are several exclusive features of Acronis True Image 11 software that distinguish it from similar products. The ability to create a disk/partition image, as well as restore a disk image in Windows without rebooting is a very unique feature only available in Acronis True Image 11 (Any partition except the system partition can be restored without reboot.) The exceptional simplicity of the software is due to interface user-friendliness and convenience. Working with the disk/partition image creation and restoration wizard requires only one answer to each question, per page. Possible answers are provided on the pages with simple and accurate comments. A user has to perform minimal steps to execute the partition image creation or restoration procedure. An extensive tool set to restore any partition under the most extreme situations.
Key Technologies- Acronis Exclusive
- Acronis Boot-time Restore
- Start working in seconds while your system is still being restored in the background
- Acronis Secure Zone
- Acronis Exclusive
- Protect your system by saving an image to a special hidden partition on your hard disk. It is especially useful for notebooks, and tablet PCs
- Acronis Exclusive
- Acronis Recovery Manager
- Boot your computer even if your operating system has failed. Just hit the F11 key to start the recovery process, when the system is powered on. Restore your system image from Acronis Secure Zone.
- Exclude files and folders
- Save space when creating backups by only backing up the data you want to keep
- Incremental and differential backup
- Decrease backup space requirements by capturing only the changes made since your last backup
- Live backups
- Continue working during your disk backup
- Scheduling
- Run backups automatically at preset or elapsed time, when the user is idle, on user login/logout, on system startup/shutdown, and on other events
- Set and forget
- Configure it once and perform backups automatically
- Add-on Tools Included!
- $40 value!
- Acronis Migrate Easy
- Hard drive cloning
- Upgrade to a new hard drive without the need to reinstall the operating system, applications or configure user settings
- Add new hard disk
- Expand your PC's storage capability
- $50 value!
- Security and Privacy Tools
- Use Acronis Drive Cleanser, File Shredder and System Clean-up utilities to protect your privacy by safely destroying sensitive data, cleaning up your system, or securely wiping the entire hard drive.
RecommendationDisk-imaging software lets you create sector-by-sector copies of hard-drive partitions, including boot information, so when disaster strikes, system recovery is a snap. Acronis True Image performs the basic functions of creating and restoring full and incremental images to hard drives, CDs, or DVDs, and it simplifies the automating and scheduling of these processes. It also permits differential images. Whereas incremental backups include only the data that has changed since your last backup, differentials allow you to create a single file containing all of the changes that have occurred since your initial full backup. That way, you never have to restore a large number of small incremental images. Equally useful is the option to back up selected files and folders, which eliminates the need for a separate file-level backup program. Acronis has the Active Restore function so you can work in Windows before you finish restoring an image. Acronis True Image 11 Home is the most powerful imaging suite available, and it is reasonably easy on the wallet.
Price- $49.99 (true bargain)
- $12.99 - Backup CD
System Configuration Requirements- Windows Vista, XP Pro x64 Edition, XP SP 2, 2000 Pro SP 4
- 300MHz or higher CPU
- 256MB RAM
- 300MB free hard disk space
- 150MB extra hard disk space for installation
For working on Windows Vista, must meet minimum Vista requirements - Supported File Systems
- FAT16/32, NTFS, Linux Ext2/Ext3, ReiserFS, Linux Swap
- Raw Images support for other partitions and corrupted file systems
For server operating systems backup see Acronis True Image Server for Windows - Supported Hardware
- Internal and external hard disks
- Networked storage devices
- CD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM
- ZIPR, JazzR and other removable media
- P-ATA (IDE), S-ATA, SCSI, IEEE1394 (Firewire), and USB 1 / 2 devices
- PC card storage devices
About AcronisAcronis offers storage management solutions that are technically advanced for mission-critical applications but easy to use. The company provides disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning, boot management, privacy, data migration, and other storage management products for enterprises, corporations and consumers of any qualification. Acronis has offices in the United States, Europe and Asia and sells its products through retail outlets, resellers and on the Web.
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