New Software To Be Reviewed Review

Trying the fully functional 30-day trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2010 was a worthwhile experience! Honestly, I was a bit skeptic about trying yet another backup/recovery package, but I was totally blown away by the huge number of useful features I found on this one!

First off, the backup process is very fast. Squeezing my 14.2GB-full C-drive into a 8.33GB compressed archive took only about 12 minutes with default settings. It was impressive! The archive naming convention has been made more meaningful with the use of wildcards, each indicating date, time, username, etc. This is a very useful feature to locate the appropriate archive later on for recovery. There are the awkwardly unnecessary options of 'backup sector by sector' (that is, uncompressed backup) and 'backup unallocated space' -- but I would try those if I'm too picky about my backups! Encryption, password protection, hard drive writing speed control, and compression level selection are also important features on this excellent Acronis release. Control over process priority gives you the ease to run backups as background process. It also allows you to split your archives so that you can copy and carry the backup volumes conveniently on multiple USB keys or CDs/DVDs. The 'non-stop backup' option lets you perform backups at five minute intervals, which can be useful when you're doing really sensitive work. In case you just want to create backups of individual files/folders, Windows configurations, emails and address books from Outlook/Outlook Express, or Application Settings, such as browsing preferences on IE or Mozilla, True Image Home has all the capabilities separately! Of course, like all other backup/recovery software, True Image Home comes with scheduling and archive validation capability. What they usually don't come with is the conversion utility that lets you convert generic Windows backup archives to True Image Home archives! True Image Home 2010 works with Windows XP/Vista and Windows 7.

Network options seemed very robust and easy-to-use. You can browse and point to a networked computer to put the backup archives on. There is an FTP interface as well, which makes it easy to store your archives on your own FTP server on the Web. The developer company, Acronis, also has an Online Backup Service, and they give away 2GB blocks of free and secure remote storage for 30 days with a purchase of True Image Home 2010. You can back up multiple PCs using one single account. More backup gigabytes would cost you a reasonable monthly amount. Online backup archives can be very useful when you want to download backup archives to a different computer for testing before actually trying to restore the image. I've always had the not-so-irrational fear of putting my private data online, but Acronis provides 'Government Grade data encryption', and my files should be safe with my encrypted password!

Looking at the backup process more closely, you will find two basic methods: 'incremental' or 'differential' modes only back up changes from a point where an initial archive was formed, and the more conventional 'full' backup mode. This can be useful for trading off the space you are willing to allocate for backup archives.

Now, talking about recovery, the most strikingly beautiful thing I discovered is that I can go into each backup archive like I use Explorer to browse my drives! There is an 'explore' right-click mean option with backup archives that lets you literally browse through them as if you're looking at the original drive or partition! I tried copying one file from the archive to another location, and voila! It worked! The other recovery options seemed standard.

On top of the regular backup and recovery operations, True Image Home comes with a number of very useful tools and utilities. The Try&Decide feature lets you have a secure and temporary space on your PC, where you can work with possibly malicious software without running a risk of damaging your system. Startup recovery manager can be activated during bootup by pressing F11. Copy bootable rescue software and data on ISO images or burn them on CDs. The 'Secure Zone' works as a partition manager, letting you make separate space for managing your backup archives. Do local search in backup archives, clone disks, destroy hard drive data securely, shred files, mount/unmount drive images,and clean up system records easily with the tools that come with True Image Home.

In all, I definitely recommend Acronis True Image Home 2010 for home and corporate users for all the good features it has. I did frown at the price when I downloaded the trial, but after I really tried it out, it seemed to be a perfectly good investment for all the data security one may need. Download the trial version or buy Acronis True Image Home 2010 for $49.99 on Acronis website, or better yet, get a deal as incredibly low as $29.99 on Amazon!