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Review: Acronis True Image 10 Home Edition

by Steve Kerrison on 28 December 2006, 15:36

Tags: Acronis

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Final thoughts, HEXUS.awards and HEXUS.right2reply

What it all boils down to... what it always boils down to, is money. Is True Image 10 Home Edition worth the money?

You can backup your disks with DriveImageXML for free. You can backup files with NTBackup or Xcopy for free. So why pay for a backup app? Simple... it's so easy to use.

True Image 10 makes creating backups easier than highlighting a load of files and hitting delete (oh, the irony). What's more, with Vista and x64 support, along with its Linux bootable and BartPE recovery components, it can save the day in nigh on any situation. A few of the added features are a little less useful than others. Application settings support didn't do anything for us, but then again, it didn't take away from the fact that we have an amazing backup solution here.

The icing on the cake is the price. Sit down for this. Acronis True Image 10 Home Edition costs Ā£25. Twenty-five pounds! If it doesn't pay for itself in the time saved setting up backups, then it will in the time and data saved should something go wrong with your computer. So yes, it is worth the money... every penny. True Image 10 is essential software, and provided Acronis delivers regular updates to keep hardware and software support fresh, it will remain essential.

Got data you really don't want to lose? Give True Image a try... there's even a 15-day trial (in a meaty 101MiB package) so you can get a feel of the program for yourself.

HEXUS Awards

We almost gave this product an "Editor's Choice" award, but given that we have no recent examinations of any competing products, we've decided to hold that thought. Still, this product comes highly recommended.

HEXUS.essentials :: Recommended

HEXUS Where2Buy

True Image 10 Home Edition can be purchased from CompuTrolley, or from the Acronis online store.



HEXUS Forums :: 8 Comments

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Just been having a play with a trial this past couple of hours - looks like I might as well upgrade, as it does all I need now and I'm sure it will for the near future

EDIT - just decided to stick with corporate workstation 9 - the inability of 10 to mount a drive image as a drive in Windows is pretty key to me.
really is awesome software :)

been using it for a few weeks now
Independant of this review, I had just purchased a copy which is £26 as quoted in the review, plus VAT (and Postage if you want the physical CD, which is also a ready made bootable recovery CD) so worked at at £34 in total.

I bought it not so much because I want a backup application, but rather because I wanted an Imaging application to save time in future doing fresh re-installs, and this seemed better that Ghost.

I want to install a fresh copy of XP, and update to the latest patches, plus install all the core stuff (e.g. Office 2003) that also need ‘activating’ and activate it. Run a Disk Defrag and there I have a new, fresh, efficient, activated ready to go XP install. This takes time and is a bit of a chore particularly setting all the base configs I want.

So now I want to take an image of the system at this ‘freshly installed and activated’ state, so I can quickly and easily revert to it at any time I want or need. I like to revert to a ‘fresh install’ every now and again (6 months or so) - as I find the system is faster.

If this works out I won't have all the usual pain and hassle everytime I do a ‘fresh install’ - I only need to do it once per physical system, and then re-image whenever I need to.
We investigated this at work after using Ghost for ages, we only really need it for imaging HDDs, and we were all really impressed with the useability of it. We bought a few copies of it for someone we helped to set up a little “internet cafe” for, to re-load an image if someone screws it up :) and it's really easy for them to be able to do without needing massive amounts of techie knowledge.

There are loads of features in it we'd probably never use, but it is an outstanding piece of software, especially for the price.
It's great that it supports Vista already!

I had a quick look at the 94 page user manual from the acronis website and sorry in advance for asking a dumass question but here it is anyway.

If I want to transfer all my files as a result of upgrading to a larger hard disk, does XP (& Acronis True Image) need to be installed before the image can be recreated? or can you simply recreate your old hard disk by copying the image across? I know it only takes an hour to install XP but it seems a bit rubbish having to reinstall XP and then recreate from there. Maybe I'm just lazy :)