Acronis True Image Home 2011 Review

by Raja Rajan · Published January 14, 2011 · Updated January 14, 2011

When your hard dirve fails or when your are pushed to situation where you have to format the drive, you might be put into a situation more often where you have to pick and choose the most important data on your computer and leave the rest. With disk imaging software you won’t have to worry about the data on your computer. The disk imaging softwares will take a snapshot of your hard drive and let you restore them in event of hard drive failure. All you have to do is load the disk image and and all your data will be restored.

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What is a Disk Imaging Software?

Disk imaging software takes a picture of your hard drive at regular intervals, so that you can use the image to recover your data from any disaster that may occur to your computer. With a disk imaging software you don’t have to worry about losing any of your data.

Who needs a Disk Imaging Software?

Any one who has sensitive data on the personal computer like collection of favorite music, family videos, picture albums, your personal information, office and other important documents will be in need of disk imaging software. These softwares will help you to restore your data in case of any virus attack or failed hard drive.

Arconis True Image Home 2011

Acronis True Image Home 2011 is disk imaging software that can help you to backup all your important data, including photos, videos, music, documents and applications and helps to recover them from a disaster. It is a is a comprehensive backup suite that allows you to carry out both scheduled and one-off backups of your computer and data.

Requirements

(taken from Arconis website)

Operating systems

Windows 7 all Editions
Windows Vista all Editions SP2
Windows XP Home Edition (32 bit, SP3)
Windows XP Professional (32 & 64 bit, SP2)

Supported File Systems

FAT 16/32
NTFS
exFAT
Ext2/Ext3/Ext4
ReiserFS
Linux SWAP

System Requirements

Pentium Processor 1 GHz or faster
512 MB RAM
CD-RW/DVD-RW drive for bootable media creation
Using Acronis Nonstop Backup requires at least 1 GB RAM
High speed internet connection (for use with Acronis Online Backup)

Supported Storage Media

Hard Disk Drives
Networked Storage Devices
FTP servers
CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, BD-R
ZIP, Jaz and other removable media
PATA (IDE), SATA, SCSI, SAS, IEEE1394 (Firewire), USB1/2.0/3.0 drives
Windows Dynamic Disks and GPT volumes support available with Plus Pack add-on.

Price

$49.99 (as per Arconis website at the time of writing)

Features of Acronis True Home 2011

Acronis offers the ability to restore your data to any point in time by continuously taking backup of your hard drive. You can also define you own backup option by selecting a particular folder or whole partition. It also has predefined backup templates that are deigned for specific user needs like space efficient templates for users with limited backup storage to templates for higher security of data, which consumes more disk space.

Another feature of Acronis True Home is the Time Explorer. You can easily manage your backups and provide backup comments that explains the state of the desktop at the moment of the backup. If you have enabled a full disk backup, then you can restore your entire hard drive to earlier state without even needing to install an operating system through the recovery Manager. It also offers disk image Encryption with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with 128, 192 and 256-bit encryption.

Review

Acronis True Image is an excellent data backup software product. You can backup your whole system or individual files and applications, which saves time and space. Acronis backed up and restored all the data on our backup tests and they have great customer support.

When you first run True Image Home 2011, it asks, whether you want to backup critical data, use the backup assistant or launch the main application. Choosing to backup critical data will create a one-time backup of your entire system, while the backup assistant provides a little more control and guides the user toward continual or scheduled backup options.

In main screen True Image offers two options, incremental backups (Scheduled Backup) which takes a full backup for the first time and regularly updates the image as the data in the drive changes and the second option is full backup, which as the name says takes a full backup of the drive. You can also schedule the full backup to be done on pre-defined intervals say weekly or monthly.

The Acronis True Image viewer can open an image you’ve created previously as a local drive. This option allows you view and access the backup files and folders conveniently. Also you can use your USB3.0 external hard disk for backup as True Image offers support for USB 3.0 drives.

Another useful feature offered by Acronis True Image Home is the Try & Decide feature and is arguably the best feature of this product. Using this feature, you can install new untrusted software or tune your operating system setting or use your system as a testing ground for unknown software. If something goes wrong or don’t work quite as planned, you can easily revert back to your original settings in no time.

Conclusion

Data backup should be fast and smooth and thats exactly what Acronis True Image Home 2011 does. The latest version features a user interface that resembles of the Windows 7. The users see only the most important functions, which is advantage for beginners. Expert can always revert to the advanced mode. Cloning a drive is directly accessible. Files, folders, mails, Windows 7 libraries or complete installations can be secured with True Image. The locations that you can backup up data from are extensive. A True Image Home 2011 is that the data backup can be initiated directly from the system control.

True Image Home 2011 lacks support for dynamic disks and partition tables in GPT format, and restoration to PCs with dissimilar hardware and you have to buy True Image Home Plus addon to enable this features. Acronis also offers the Online Backup add-on with which you can save your critical files to a secure remote location and recover your data using a web browser.