Product Description

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. Creates an exact copy of your PC for a full backup Backs up and restores your music, video, and data Protects your applications Boot your computer even if your operating system has failed and restore your system image from Acronis Secure Zone Backs up your e-mails and Outlook data and settings Try & Decide: easy rollback of system changes Protects your PC application configuration settings Schedules backups automatically by time or system events Privacy protection Supports Microsoft Windows Vista Email notifications Saves to FTP

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1338 in Software
• Brand: Acronis
• Model: 890204002043
• Released on: 2007-10-01
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Vista
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: .24 pounds

Features

• Powerful, flexible backup software for the PC
• Create an exact copy for a full backup or only important data
• Backup emails; backup and restore music, video, and data
• Protect PC application configuration settings; privacy protection
• Easy rollback of system changes; schedule backups automatically

From the Manufacturer
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 and application settings--your choice!

You've accumulated a lifetime of memories on your home PC, in addition to important personal documents, such as tax returns and resumes, not to mention all the applications you have installed and unique settings for each family member that took countless hours to set up. Acronis True Image 11 Home helps make certain that you are adequately protected, ensuring that you can recover your precious data in case your PC fails or your computer hard disk is damaged by a virus.

Features:

• Backup your entire PC: Acronis True Image includes our patented disk-imaging backup technology. You can copy your entire PC, including the operating system, applications, user settings, and all data. In the event of a system or disk crash, virus attack, or other fatal failures, you can restore the entire disk contents in minutes--no reinstallations required!
• Backup your documents, music, video, photos, and e-mails: Protect your digital memories from a fatal system failure. Unlike traditional printed pictures or music CDs if your PC crashes, those memories could be lost forever without Acronis True Image.
• Protect your applications: use Acronis True Image to restore all the settings for Microsoft Office, iTunes, Media Player, and dozens of other most popular applications!
• New! Try&Decide: Test new software or browse the Web in a protected, safe environment. At the end of the session, you decide whether to keep or discard the changes made to your system.
• New! 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.

Acronis True Image gives you the power to do much more sophisticated tasks to satisfy your most advanced backup needs:

• 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

Key Technologies

• Acronis Boot-time Restore: start working in seconds while your system is still being restored in the background.
• Acronis Secure Zone: 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 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!

• 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.
• 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.

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Customer Reviews

Excellent Software for Backing Up Your OS Installation
A couple of months ago there was a power outage, and even though my UPS kicked in, the auto-shutdown software didn't. When I tried to reboot, there was a Blue Screen of Death waiting for me. I tried everything from reinstalling XP, to recovery console, safe mode, BIOS fiddling, nothing worked.

I didn't have any backups, so I was out of luck. But as I went through the incredibly time consuming drudgery of reinstalling Windows and 50 or so other programs that I had on my original install, I kept thinking to myself, "there has to be a better way".

So I decided to spare no expense. My first purchase was a 2TB external hard-drive (split to 1TB with RAID 1), and my second was this software. And it works like a charm for my use (btw, I don't consider DVD backups to be a viable option).

The first step in backing up my new install was to establish a secure zone on my RAIDed drive (about 25 GB). This is a special partition invisible to the OS (and viruses, spyware, etc.) so it can't be accidentally deleted or modified. This was simple to do, and the hidden partition's size can be adjusted at any time.

I performed the initial backup with no problems. A previous reviewer mentioned that the green progress bar wasn't providing sufficient feedback. For my purposes, however, I don't back up individual sets of files or folders, I back up the entire hard drive, bit for byte, to include the MFTs and Boot sectors, etc. I don't need to see what's being copied at any given moment, because I already know its either a '0' or a '1'. Anyway, compression is decent (9 GB for 20 GB worth of files) and fast (usually 10-15 minutes to complete).

I've also set up a scheduled weekly backup which is done "incrementally" and only saves the changes from the original. TrueImage will automatically delete old backups to make room for new ones, as you begin to fill up your "secure zone".

I've actually begun to use this in lieu of "System Restore". I try to keep most of my regularly updated stuff on my RAIDed external drive now (I actually moved "My Documents" there) and anytime I have a serious problem I can actually restore the system to a previous state week by week. I've already done this 3 or 4 times in the past 2 months using a boot CD created by the software and it works flawlessly.

It's a good feeling to know that you can reverse any changes made to your system. There's even a feature called 'Try and Decide' that let's you do this in real-time and undo any changes made during an installation or other activity. If you're looking for a robust backup solution that perhaps doesn't involve backing up to CDs/DVDs, this software will work for you.

Beware of Relying on this to Restore your Failed HardDrive!
I purchased this software to have a robust ability to restore my hard drive completely (not just user data) in the case of a drive failure. This is what the "image backup" functionality is for, to allow you to re-create a fully-operational version of your system very quickly in the event of a drive failure. (As opposed to just a data backup, which still requires you to reinstall the operating system, programs, and all your user settings again from scratch.)

So, here's my take:
1) First, any of the positive reviews that have not actually tried to use their backups to restore should really not be given much weight. If you can backup fine, but can't restore, what's the point?
2) I am running Windows Vista with a 1 TB drive, and this program worked fine in creating the image backup.
3) When my drive started throwing off errors, and I replaced it with a new one, I went to my Acronis boot CD to restore from my backup image (on an external drive.) Part way through the restore wizard, the restore program just froze, for no apparent reason. And I have been completely unable to restore my system from my backup.

Here is the experience I had with the technical support:
- You should know that by default, technical support is only available via email with a 48 hr response time. While this seems reasonable for only paying $40 for a software product, a 48-hour response time makes the product fairly meaningless in the event of a failure, as I can easily restore the operating system and programs from scrtach in less time than this (and just use the free built-in windows backup for a data restore).
- I went ahead and paid an extra $30 for a single-incident "premium support", which is real-time phone support. However, after 3 separate phone calls, each on hold for 20-30 minutes and NEVER getting a live person (I had to leave a messages), I finally received some email communications which contained solutions that made no impact to my issue.
- The Tech Support emails provided new "CD images" that they wanted me to use instead of my standard boot CD. (I'm not sure, but I doubt most folks have an extra PC and CD burner sitting around to be abe to do this, when their main PC is dead.)
- Then I received an email asking me to reformat a flash drive, plug it into my dead computer, and write a batch script that would execute numerous lines of Linux command line codes. Ok, I'm a pretty technical guy, but I'm not familiar with Linux. And if the solution to a restore problem requires "normal everyday users" who are buying this product for easy home backup/restore to program in Linux, I would suggest this product is not the right fit for most folks.

I thought I did my homework/research ........
Here's a caveat: your mileage may vary! Reviews are reflective of individual preferences and experiences. In the case of software, especially for Windows, there are so many potential gotchas and hazards within each unique system that what is true and good for one system may be disaster for the next. In my case I have three computers and they are all different models, brands, versions of Windows, and my experience with installing the very same software on all three does not always result in the same outcome for all three.

With that said, my two cents' worth on Acronis v. 11 is --- DISASTER waiting to happen. Let me say up front that I've been in the I.T./I.S. biz since 1969, my most recent job was Director of Technology Services for a mid-size company. I know PCs and Windows. When I look for a new product to fulfill a need I always perform due diligence. I thought so, anyway. By process of elimination I decided to install the trial version of Acronis True Image Home v. 11. It installed fine, I set everything up for a full backup three times a week of two SCSI drives. Everything *seemed* to run fine (silly me!) so I purchased the program. After a couple of weeks I decided to dig into the files within the backup archives. Lo and behold, it appeared the only real full backup I actually got was the very first one. Oh, the program claimed that it was faithfully backing up both of my entire hard drives (not a sector-by-sector backup but a full disk file backup) with no errors, and I was feeling pretty secure. So after not seeing any actual files within the archives for subsequent backups, I opened a trouble ticket with Acronis tech support.

My troubleshooting skills are excellent but between Acronis and me, we couldn't get to the bottom of the problem. It was always "try this, try that, try something else." To make matters even worse, the program stopped working at all -- I started getting an error of "unable to create volume snapshot" during the initiation of the backup, and it wouldn't even try to back up. The solution from Acronis was to advise that I stop running various essential programs, such as my anti-virus, anti-spyware, and Norton's GoBack. They seemed oblivious to the fact that Acronis backed everything up fine the very first time. Sigh.

Acronis support also wanted me to completely uninstall Acronis and reinstall. I did so twice, which was quite time consuming, because as any techie knows, you still must go into the Windows registry and clean up debris and clutter that's left over. After wasting about six weeks of troubleshooting with Acronis, I had to give up and move on. I obviously didn't do my homework when searching for a robust backup solution. I found out after the fact, from user comments on various tech forums, that if you have a "complex" system, Acronis is not good at emergency restores and often cannot even boot from the recovery CD. Okay, lesson learned the hard way. At least the program wasn't all that expensive, but gee, I really hated to give up. I will say their support was a little slow to respond initially (it's only via e-mail) but once they started assisting me they were very quick to respond. When I didn't get back to them within a couple of days they always re-contacted me and asked that I update them with my progress.

I'm now running a trial of StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop 3.2. So far, so good, it works flawlessly, does full, incremental and differential backups. You can schedule any type of backup to run automagically at any time. I ran one full backup of both hard drives and I run differential backups two times a day, every day. Yep, I checked, the files are really being backed up.

Another difference between these two programs is that Acronis, like most other backup/recovery programs, creates a Linux bootable recovery CD. From what I can discern this can cause problems with "difficult" systems. On the other hand, StorageCraft's software creates an emergency CD that runs a basic version of Windows Vista, which means you'll have many more drivers available for those pesky difficult systems, like mine.

Buyer beware! This was $35 down the drain for me.

Update, 7/1/2008, about the StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop 3.2:
I highly recommend it although Amazon doesn't currently sell it. It works flawlessly, does incremental and full backups, as many times a day or week or month as you have room for on the backup device, supports many types of hardware for the backup media; the "bare metal" recovery CD is a Windows Vista OS, which means you'll have many more drivers available than if you have a Linux recovery CD. The term "bare metal" means your hard drive or Windows has died and you have to boot from a CD and essentially restore everything on the backup media. The backup software runs at any time of day or night, does its job super fast and with no errors. I am very pleased with StorageCraft; it's running on two of my PCs, one with WinXP Home, one with WinXP Pro that has two large SCSI hard drives. Finally I can relax and not worry about our backups.