Acronis True Image Home 2009
From Acronis
List Price: $39.99
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Customer Reviews
Reliable back up of System Partition and boot sector!
I had been using Norton’s Ghost for years on my old system. When I got a new computer I found out that Ghost was redone with new code and had bad reviews for being unable to restore the system partition. I tried Paragon’s Disk Management Suite 9.0, only to have my hard drive wiped clean when a restore of the system partition locked up right in the middle of the restore.
That’s when I tried Acronis True Image Home 2009. Right after I installed Acronis, I let it find and install the newest version online. I then made a bootable restore disk which is simple to do. You just select this option in the menu, select your CD or DVD writable drive and it makes the disk for you.
I then selected the option to restore the system disk with the boot sector. It took 35 minutes to create an image of my system partition which was drive C:\ (I had 35 GB of data on the drive) It was easy to use. I was using an external 500GB USB drive for the backup. The software automatically found this drive and selected it for the backup image.
After removing some programs from my system partition, I put in the bootable restore disk and re-imaged my system drive and boot sector from the back up image. There was one place where the software asks you to select the destination disk but the choices took a couple minutes to appear. Once it appeared I selected my original drive and started the backup. This took the same amount of time as making the image. (35 minutes)
I took out the bootable disk and restarted my computer and everything was restored. If this software didn’t do anything else I’d still be happy. Because with out a quick system restore like this, re-installing all the software, updates, drivers and settings on a hosed system can take all day instead of 35 minutes. The one thing that I was sure to do is uncheck the feature that would automatically make a new image every week. I was not sure if it overwrites the original or makes a new file name.
As far as just backing up files without the OS. I don’t really care because Vista Home Premium already has a decent backup system built into the OS.
Hard Drive Clone mostly successful
I am using Windows Vista Premium 64-bit. NOTE: The FREE TRIAL bootable disc clone function is disabled. I was able to create the bootable CD but it would not clone. The Windows version got hung up when trying to clone a 640GB hard drive. The drives were identical (same make, model & size). BE CAREFUL when selecting source and destination drives. The drives do not display in the same order each time you run the software. The bootable version display has even less information to help determine which drive is which. This is only a problem if you have two or more drives that are the same size. I created a bootable CD-R but that did not work because I had removed the SATA DVD drive and replaced it with two Plextor IDE drives (w/PCI card). I added the SATA DVD drive back in and got the bootable CD to work. The clone was successful using the bootable CD. Before I did that I also tried to create bootable removable media. That did not work but I did not figure out why. I changed the BIOS setting first, to boot from removable media, but that did not cure the problem. I used this software for cloning only and did not test any other functions. I prefer GoodSync for backup & restore. Note that the free Maxtor MaxBlast software appears to be the same as Acronis TrueImage for hard drive setup but it will only work if you have at least one Maxtor or Seagate drive installed.
Excellent back up software
I upgraded from Acronis True Image 8.0 to Home 2009 recently.
And then I encountered a hard drive crash.
I reinstalled everything on a new hard drive, and used Acronis 2009 successfully to back up the hard drive several times.
I tested out the recovery as well, as I installed SQL server and had a problem with it. So I reverted to a previous Acronis image and it worked perfectly.
I also have the Acronis secure zone on my XP system, and it works flawlessly as well.
Overall I am very happy with Acronis and the functionality it has provided.