BIOS: Technology Means Business

US-based Acronis has updated True Image, its low-cost backup and disaster recovery solution for desktop PCs running Windows 95 or later. According to Acronis, True Image 7.0 is one of the most intuitive disk imaging, backup and recovery software applications available thanks to its automated, wizard-driven interface that promises to make the backup and restore process a breeze.

True Image 7.0 creates an exact disk image of your PC, which is then used to make a full backup. It does this by viewing your hard disk as a group of sectors (the physical divisions of the disk), compared to most other backup programs that view them as groups of files. The software then translates the image into a set of files, allowing you to restore an individual file as well as re-create the entire hard disk.

The disk image file includes all your PC's data, including the operating system, programs, software updates and patches, data files, configurations, preference settings, e-mails, images, audio files and so on. In the event that you encounter a fatal system failure, you can restore the entire drive contents to a known, working state or simply replace the lost or corrupted files and folders.

The software is based on Acronis' Drive Snapshot technology, which allows it to create a live system disk image without shutting down your PC or forcing you to boot to DOS. True Image lets you create a bootable diskette or CD to create a disk image on a hard disk formatted using FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP. The software also provides sector-by-sector support for other partitions and corrupted file systems.

New to version 7.0 is the ability to make incremental backups, allowing you to save time and storage space by backing up just the latest changes to your hard disk image, as well as scheduled backups, where you can set the software to create unattended, full or incremental backups at any time. However, you can't launch a backup from a Windows command line, so you can't run it from a batch file or create a shortcut. Secure Zone lets you store your data in a hidden and safe location on your hard disk, and Startup Recovery Manager allows you to recover your system by restoring your disk image without creating a bootable rescue disk by pressing F11 during bootup.

Finally, a new image verification tool helps to ensure that the image you just made is error-free and can be restored without any problems, and disk cloning and disk deployment tools let you deploy a new hard disk on your PC by migrating your OS and all data to the new hard disk.

Links:
True Image 7.0 Web site