BIOS: Technology Means Business

Acronis' True Image 8.0 is a complete disk imaging and system backup application for single systems running Windows. The reasonably priced software allows you to create an exact disk image for complete system backup and disk cloning, including all computer data, operating system, and programs. It can also be used to quickly and easily deploy a new hard disk on your PC - migrating all data, operating systems, programs, software patches and updates, and everything else automatically. The Create Bootable Media wizard also generates bootable recovery CDs or floppy disks, which load the program in DOS mode to perform common tasks such as restoring a hard disk. However, the greatest attraction of the low-cost software is that it allows you to restore your entire system or simply replace lost files after a major system crash, providing piece of mind to both small-business users and individuals.

Pros: Easy to use; imaging and cloning tools; incremental backups
Cons: Designed for single PCs only; no UDF recording software

True Image 8.0 is Acronis' latest upgrade to its expanding family of workstation disk imaging and backup software. The software is a breeze to operate and provides intuitive tools for disk imaging, backup and system restore. The main reason the software is so easy to use is that it's driven by automated, wizard-driven menus that make backing up, cloning and restoring hard disks a snap.

True Image 8.0 lets you create the exact disk image of live workstations for a complete file and system backup, including the operating system, programs and data. Even software updates and patches, configurations, preference settings, and e-mails are backed up. In the event of fatal system failure, you can restore your entire hard disk drive contents to a known working state, or simply replace the lost or corrupted files and folders.

The software extends on version 7.0 by allowing you to exclude paging/hibernate files from the disk image and assign the priority for the disk imaging process to enable the PC to prioritise between disk imaging and other applications. This helps to reduce disk backup time and storage. True Image 8.0 also allows for the verification of a disk image before executing the restore command and file system checking after restoring an image. You can also create an online system backup without needing to reboot your system, helping you to stay productive whilst protecting your PC in the event of data loss or file corruption.

You can store images onto removable media, such as local drives, network drives, or a DVD drive, and you can restore a partition or lost data from an image at any time. You can also connect an image as a virtual drive, browse its contents and extract selected files to a hard disk. If images of large partitions or several disks are large they can be split into several files that together make an original image, otherwise known as a 'spanned volume'. However, there's no UDF recording software included, so you'll have to further purchase a CD/DVD authoring package if you intend to backup images to optical media.

The software's main interface clearly presents its tools into three groups: Disk Imaging (create an image, restore an image, explore an image, and unplug an image), New Disk Deployment (create a disk clone or add a new disk) and Tasks (create a scheduled image creation or restoration task with specified time or periodicity).

Double-clicking on any of these tasks takes you into their respective wizard-driven menus. True Image 8.0 also provide a Secure Zone, where you can store disk and partition images securely using password protection and encryption. Other applications can't access files stored here as they are used by True Image only for image security purposes.

The main part of the software is creating a partition (disk) image. Creating a disk image means backing up all data stored on your PC, allowing you to restore your PC after failure and helping to protect from data losses. You can select one or more hard disks to backup, or any combination of partitions and hard disks.

You can also select whether you want to create a complete or incremental disk image. An incremental image contains data only from hard disk sectors that have changed since the previous disk image (complete or incremental). Incremental backups can be up to 10 times smaller and quicker to complete than full backups, but they do not provide the complete features of a full backup.

Restoring an image is just as easy. However, if you restore an image from an incremental backup, you must have the current image as well as the last one, or preferably the previous incremental images and the initial complete image. Working with incremental image backups therefore adds a little complexity to an otherwise no-brainer routine.

It's also worth remembering that all Windows operating systems to not support FAT32. For instance, MS-DOS, Windows 95 and NT 3.x/4.x only suppport FAT16, so will not be able to restore a FAT32 or NTFS partition backed up from a Windows XP system. Before an image is restored, True Image can check its integrity to make sure the backup and its associated files are sound.

True Image, like any other decent backup software, allows you to schedule tasks so that you don't have to remember the last time you imaged your disk. Adhering to a schedule also helps to ensure that you data is regularly backed up. You can also create more than one independently scheduled task. For instance, you can image your work documents daily and backup your applications only weekly.

The benefit of this is that it reduces the number of imaging operations, thus saving time, whilst providing nearly the same level of data safety. Schedules can be set for daily (or once in several days), weekly, monthly, one time only, when your computer starts, when you log on, when you log, or even when your computer shuts down. Of course, you can also set start times where applicable.