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Summary: Acronis TrueImage Home is a cost-effective, easy to use, reliable backup software solution. As long time readers know, I frequently mention backing up as one of the biggest and most important missed opportunities that too many people are overlooking to protect themselves. And I get reports every day of people who've lost important data, sometimes everything, that a simple backup solution would have protected them against. If you're still without a backup solution I recommend Acronis True Image Home as an easy to use solution for anyone who should be backing up but isn't. Acronis is easy to set up, can back up files and folders, or your entire machine, and can similarly restore individual files and folders, or your an entire machine image, quickly and easily. When used with an external hard drive, Acronis True Image can be a nearly "set it and forget it" backup solution. In fact, it's what's running on the very machine I'm using as I write this. • My recommendation for backup software has always been, much like a physical exercise program, "anything you will actually do". Almost any backup solution is better than no backup solution. But in reality, some backup solutions are definitely better than others. While there are many good backup programs out there, after having used Acronis TrueImage for a couple of years myself now, I feel confident recommending it as a solution you should consider. In my particular case, I have it configured to perform a full backup of my primary machine once a month, and an incremental backup (copying only things that changed since the previous backup) once a night. That allows me to do two very important things: "... after
having used Acronis
for a couple of year myself now, I feel confident
recommending it ..."
Like I said, I get reports of data loss in one form or another every day: emails gone, family pictures lost, important documents irrecoverable. And all that loss could have been prevented with a backup solution in place. The sad truth is that most people don't learn this lesson until it's too late. Most people decide that they need a backup solution only after they've suffered some kind of loss. And that loss is often significantly more expensive than the backup solution would have been. And Acronis TrueImage is not expensive. I'll bet that it's significantly less expensive than losing your important or irreplaceable files. The setup that I use works very well with an external USB hard drive. I happen to have an external 250 gigabyte drive on my desktop machine, to which these nightly backups happen without any thought on my part. Again, external drives have come down dramatically in price, and the capacity just seems to be going up and up. It's worth it. Try Acronis TrueImage today. I recommend it. Article 12442 | Posted May 17, 2008 |
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Susan: in my case ATI did recognize my external USB drive,
and I've restored directly from that. My guess is that it
has to do with the age of and/or USB support in the
machine's BIOS, but I could be wrong.
Leo
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Posted by: Leo at May 28, 2008 10:19 AMsxyDK4F9tvhDr3Rs2jCf/7Q=
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Igor: it's a little unclear, I can't tell if you're
attempting to backup that external drive or not.
If you are my recommendation would be to set up two separate
backup jobs, one for it specifically that can fail when it's
not around, and another for "everything else" that should
presumably keep working.
Leo
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Posted by: Leo at May 28, 2008 10:22 AMW2yDv6JfBFHskzq25zZa8T0=
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Leo,
I'm not attempting to back the USB drive nor am I using it for storing backups. The problem is that the Acronis TIH checks ALL drives before it starts running backup jobs and it somehow "remembers" that I have an USB drive and tries to check it, even though it's not used in backups. Then it falsely reports "bad sectors" for it and doesn't want to continue with the job.
The original "sinner" is Windows, which sometimes doesn't recognize the drive when returning from hibernation. But Acronis options should be flexible enough to be able disable drive checking.
Posted by: Igor Brejc at May 29, 2008 08:58 AMI have been using TI for years and it has saved me lots of grief on numerous occasions.
I do an incremental every night and once a week start over with a full image and then incremental for a week.
The Clone option is also a good idea.
You can clone your C drive to an internal hard drive and if your C drive fails then all you have to do is physically switch the drives or cable and boot up and your back up and running in minutes and then you can replace your disk that failed at a later time.
For those not familiar with that familiar, it just makes your second hard drive another C drive.
http://www.domdedomdom.com/
Posted by: Dominick at May 30, 2008 08:05 AMBy chance only just purch Acronis True Image Home V 11 and your article was perfect guidence for using what I purchased in a Pro-manner.
Posted by: Eugene H Brown at June 9, 2008 09:36 PMThanks a Bunch,
Gene Brown in Charlotte, NC
Hi, I would like to mention that any external hard disc that is used for your back up must be removed from the system after your backup, I made the mistake of using two partition's in my External hard disc, one for my backups the other for programmes that I didn't want on my computer internal hard disc, hence I always had my External hard disc connected, don't know why yet, but my backup was corrupted, I lost all my backups the Acronis 11 partition was completely empty.
Posted by: Roy Phillips at July 8, 2008 03:55 PMDid the Acronis report, Acronis told me of the corruption.
One good thing came out of this, my Try and Decide had never worked, I have now found that the programme can be re downloaded from my account on the Acronis web site, this cured my problems with the Acronis programme.
I have had to restore on two occasions, Acronis worked like a dream each time, it certainly does what it says it can do.
Hope this helps someone.
Regards
Roy Phillips
I find a glaring problem with this article that was slightly covered by a comment:
Posted by: RangeRover at July 17, 2008 09:23 PMI have a 180GB backup of my entire system using Acronis True Image 11. Sounds responsible right?
Well, when the time came to restore my OS with TI 11, It simply said, and I have realized too late, that my backup on my 500GB External drive cannot be used with TI11 - so what's the point? I can't very well store a 200GB image on my internal HD.
I'm at a loss as to how you say that it works so great from your external drive....
It backed up alright, giving me a nice 'false' sense of security. That recover disk booted, I found the image on my external (all as instructed) and then I find out that it will not apply the image even though it's found it, because it's an external USB drive. That is a real buzz-kill!
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I guess I don't understand the issue you're having. The fact
that it's on an external drive *shouldn't* impact anything.
Yes, I'll reiterate that I confirmed the ability to restore
from an external USB drive before recommending this product.
The only thing I can think of is that there's something
different about your drive or USB setup that the Acronis
restoration program doesn't recognize. While that's no
consolation to you it's certainly *not* a common case.
As long as Windows recognizes the drive, you'll at a minimum
be able access that backup from within Windows.
Leo
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I've had Acronis 10 for quite a while. I use an external 160GB hard drive for backup storage from my 400GB Sata drive.
Finally I had to restore. It went very smoothly and I was pleased at the initial outcome. However, (and I assume it's because Acronis runs on the Linux program) that all of my drive letters were changed. Hence, all my shortcuts on the desktop were out of sequence.
So I engaged Partition Magic to change them back to what they originally were. I had 4 partitions, operating system, programs, video and documents,pictures,music. So I went to change the letters back to what they originally were; however, because of an unused removable disk letter (one of the memory stick drives) taking up one of the original drive letter names I couldn't change all of them back to their correct paths.
And I'm still trying to figure out how to rectify and try to reason why it changed the drive letters.
Posted by: Linda at August 12, 2008 09:55 PMI have had TrueImage 11 now for since April, 2008. Most of its features work well, except for "Save Application Settings". If I select the All button, the function crashes. If I do subsets it works fine. I can do 4 or 5 in the list at a time. I use Vista Home Premium with SP1. I reported this to Acronis and they are "working on it". They had me send crash dumps after each new build, but to date it is still not functioning. Also, only a small number of applications (9 or 10) show in the list. I don't now if this correct.
Posted by: eesamp at August 28, 2008 11:16 AM