Acronis True Image Home 2009 Review Discussion

By Greg Ross

More often than not, users don't realize the importance of backing up their data until it's too late. A hard drive dies, a folder is deleted, or a virus attacks an operating system and leaves the user trying to recover their data. But the files are gone, often permanently.

Today, we dive into the first of a series of programs designed to protect the user from happenstances like those. Come on in and read the full review of our first product, Acronis True Image Home 2009!

Read the full content of this Article: Acronis True Image Home 2009 Review

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Great review!

Though I like this backup staff, manual backup+external HDD with raid 1 is more trusty solution. I have WD Mybook studio and keep all my staff on external HDD-makes life a lot easier.
1)Files are safe
2)changing PC is much easier

con of is the cost-external raid hdd's cost a lot!

 

i gave up on acronis a while back. great review but i will not use the product myself after numerous bad backups it made. i have since switched to shadow protect

 

Excellent review!

I believe you can still 15 day trial for free before you need to purchase, also!


Cin

 

External RAID is expensive. Now, internal desktop RAID1 isn't expensive at all...but this is a notebook website so I digress.

In general though, people just do not do backups like they should. You might do it, but unless there is a tool that someone can install that does it for them easily enough....it doesn't happen as often as it should.

I haven't had a problem with Acronis True Image v10, nor did I with Acronis True Image Home 2009. However, I did *hear* that v11 had issues.

But we cannot test every possible combination of hardware or software, so who knows for sure.

However, this USB issue cropping up is really something that consumers need to be aware of. Acronis claims to have a fix for the problem, and said fix came out days prior to our publishing this review .

Users are definitely encouraged to try before you buy. Unlike many competitors, ATI's trial edition is not 'feature limited.'

 

Are there any open source alternatives to this? I just need partition cloning. CloneZilla any good?

 

Nice in-depth review.

I would point out for users of Seagate drives you can get a free download of DiscWizard from Seagate's website. It is a limited version of True Image. While it doesn't seem to have all the features of True Image, it works well for what I use it for, namely to do a clean install and make an image of the clean install, which I can put back at any time if need be.

I guess if you're on a limited budget and have a Seagate drive, it's worth consideration. It's why always get Seagate drives for my machines, even if they're not the fastest.

 

I'd recommend the free version of DriveImage XML, it can backup partitions, logical drives (and much more).

Very nice review Greg.
The importance of (regular) backups can't be stressed enough.

 

Do they really allow imaging selected partitions in this version? That's been the major weakness of v10 and v11 for me, and might actually cause me to upgrade.

One other weakness --I've had difficulty in versions 10 and 11 with resizing partitions upon restore. Doesn't always seem to work well. So I've had to use a combination of TI 11 and Ghost Corporate, because TrueImage can't always do what I need properly.

 

I'm running v10 on my personal computer at home, even that version supports partition backups. I run weekly backups of my data partition, and monthly backups of the OS partition.