When your hard drive fails or when you are pushed to a situation where you have to format the drive, you might be put into a situation more often where you have to 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 pieces of software will take a snapshot of your hard drive and let you restore them in the event of hard drive failure. All you have to do is load the disk image and all your data will be restored.
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?
Anyone who has sensitive data on the personal computer like a 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 software programs will help you to restore your data in case of any virus attack or failed hard drive.
Acronis True Image Home 2011
Acronis True Image Home 2011 is disk imaging software that can help you to back up all your important data, including photos, videos, music, documents and applications and helps to recover them from a disaster. It 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 Acronis 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 the Plus Pack add-on.
Price
$49.99 (as per Acronis website at the time of writing)
Features of Acronis True Home, 2011
Acronis offers the ability to restore your data to any point by continuously taking backup of your hard drive. You can also define your 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 explain 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 back up 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 back up critical data, use the backup assistant or launch the main application. Choosing to back up 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 the 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 at 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 to 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 doesn’t work quite as planned, you can easily revert to your original settings in no time.
Conclusion
Data backup should be fast and smooth, and that’s precisely 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 an 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 back 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 the True Image Home Plus add-on to enable these 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.
Links
Download trial version of Acronis True Home 2011
