Acronis True Image Home 2010 [Old Version]

by Acronis

Product Features

• Solution for reliable backup and recovery of systems, applications, settings, and personal files
• Automatically creates incremental backups every 5 minutes, preventing data loss
• Intuitive graphical interface works on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 operating systems
• Create a backup strategy of the system and implement it with just one click
• Try&Decide mode for safe installations; new scheduler offers expanded scheduling options

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B002MFSG0M
• Item model number: TI-13-DV-RT-W-EN
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 2, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (209 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,146 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #33 in Software > Utilities > Backup

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Acronis True Image Home 2010 provides home users with reliable and timeless backup and recovery of systems, applications, settings, and personal files. From an intuitive graphical interface, users can easily define where, locally or online, and how often to back up a PC. In addition, Acronis Nonstop Backup delivers continuous system and data protection, preventing data loss. Acronis True Image Home 2010 meets home user needs with a simple, yet comprehensive, backup and disaster recovery solution. The variety of backup and restore capabilities, including disk imaging, file backup, local or online backup, and continuous data protection provide ultimate protection for private systems and data. This unique consumer software offers a full set of advanced features in an affordable and easy-to-use solution.

Welcome screen provides quick access to backup and recovery features, as well as highlights any issues with your system's protection. Click to enlarge.

Easy and Fast Backup and Recovery
Acronis True Image Home 2010 provides home users reliable and timeless backup and recovery of their operating system, applications, settings, and personal files.

Friendly, Windows-style User Interface
From an intuitive graphical interface, you can easily define where, locally or online, and how often to backup a PC based on your needs.

Acronis Online Backup to a secure location
Optional Acronis online storage services are available to automatically backup valuable data or files over the Internet to a secure location.

Continuous data protection
In addition, Acronis Nonstop Backup provides continuous system and data protection, preventing data loss.

Recovery and backup management--remove old backups to free up space for new backups, for example. Click to enlarge.

Features and Benefits

Acronis True Image Home 2010 meets home-user needs with a simple, yet comprehensive, backup and disaster recovery solution. This is a unique consumer software, providing a full set of advanced features in an affordable and easy-to-use solution.

Get Ready for Windows 7
Planning on moving your system over to Windows 7? Make a full backup image of your system before beginning the upgrade or migration process. If something goes wrong during the installation, simply restore your full system from the backup. Once Windows 7 is up and running, use the full backup image to move files and folders into the new operating system.

Virtual Hard Disk Support
Convert Acronis' backup images (.tib) into virtual hard-disk files(.vhd) and vice versa, providing compatibility for Microsoft Windows 7 backup.

Tasks and logs screen shows the log of program operations and scheduled tasks. A calendar provides quick access to the logs (for past dates) or tasks (for future dates). Click to enlarge.

New Powerful Scheduler
In addition to the scheduling tools found in previous versions, the new scheduler expands the amount of scheduling options available. Use the new calendar view to build schedules and tasks. Suspend and enable tasks, specify dates to run tasks, and copy tasks to new dates.

Continuous Data Protection
Acronis Nonstop Backup automatically creates incremental backups every five minutes allowing users to roll back their system, files, and folders to any point in time in the past.

Acronis Online Backup Capability
Optional Acronis online storage services are available to automatically backup valuable data or files over the Internet to a secure location.

Boot from Windows 7 image
Windows 7 Ultimate users can boot from a backup image (.tib file) containing a backup of their system partition. This will allow the ability to test a backed up system without actual restoration. If the operating system boots from the .tib file, then it will boot when the need arises for a system recovery.

Online backup: Keep your data secure by storing it off-site. So the risk of data loss as a result of theft, fire, or other natural disasters is practically eliminated. Click to enlarge.

Core Features and Technologies

Backup

Live Backups: Keep working right through your backup for maximum convenience.

File Backup: Backup individual files, folders or file categories.

Disk Imaging: Backup and restore the entire system on-the-fly.

Incremental and differential backups: Acronis True Image Home 2010 gives you alternatives to performing full backups. You can also choose incremental and differential backup types. Both capture the changes made since the last backup, and with Acronis data compression, both save disk space.

Exclude files and folders: Back up only the data you want in order to save disk space.

Image Encryption with AES: Protect your backup data by encrypting with industry-standard security tools.

Set&Forget Backups: Configure once and perform backups automatically.

Smart Scheduling: Run backups automatically at preset or elapsed time, when the user is idle, on user long/logout, on system startup/shutdown, or in coordination with other events.

Reserve Backup Copy: Store multiple copies of the backup in another pre-defined location in a pre-selected format.

System Protection

One-Click Protection: Create a backup strategy of the system and implement it with just one click.

Acronis Secure Zone: Protect your system by saving an image to a special partition on your hard disk where it can be accessed when the system needs to be restored.

Try&Decide: Safe environment for risk-free testing of new software or visiting Web sites with potentially dangerous content.

Privacy tools: Thorough system cleaning and reliable data destruction of files, partitions, or volumes.

Try&Decide mode: Safely install system updates, drivers, and applications worry-free--if anything goes wrong, simply discard the changes. Click to enlarge.

Recovery

Acronis Startup Recovery Manager: Boot and restore a system without using an additional boot medium.

Recovery of the entire PC

Recovery of individual files and folders

Selection or exclusion of files and folders

Acronis Startup Recovery Manager: Boot and restore a system after a failure. Start the recovery process simply by selecting the F11 key, even if your operating system has failed.

Mount images in read/write mode

Create bootable media using BartPE

User Interface

Windows-style interface: The new, sleek interface of this product works on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 operating systems.

Supported Systems

Storage Media

• Hard-Disk Drives
• Networked Storage Devices
• FTP servers
• CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, BD-R (NEW! Blu-ray)
• ZIP, REV, and other removable media
• PATA (IDE), SATA, SCSI, SAS (NEW), IEEE1394 (FireWire), USB 1/2.0 drives

Supported Operating Systems

• Windows 7 all Editions (x32/x64)
• Windows Vista all Editions (x32/x64 SP2)
• Windows XP (x32 SP3/x64 SP2)
• Windows XP Professional (x32 SP3/x64 SP2)

Supported File Systems

• FAT16/32, NTFS
• Raw Images support

Product Description

Acronis True Image Home 2010 provides home users reliable and timeless backup and recovery of systems, applications, settings and personal files. From an intuitive graphical interface, users can easily define where, locally or online, and how often to backup a PC.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

196 of 201 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I must be dreaming, Acronis reality actually meets Acronis marketing hype!, October 5, 2009

By 

S. Gore (Newark, De USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Acronis True Image Home 2010 [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

True Image 2010 worked reliably for me, including 2 actual bootable hard-drive restorations. I've been using Acronis True Image in several versions over the years, and the previous 2009 edition was the nadir of their product line. For me at least, Acronis has redeemed themselves after the erratic and dangerous-to-your-data behavior of their last edition.

Pros: Disk imaging for TOTAL disk restoration capabilities, full and incremental backup, selective directory/file type data backup, editing capability of the backup image, back-up image mounting as a logical drive for easy viewing and cut & paste from image to other drives with Windows Explorer, live backup (use computer while backing), recovery manager in conjunction with Acronis Secure Zone (restoration of operating system drive while still having use of computer), bootable CD with backup and recovery capabilities, bootable from image of disk.

Cons: None that I could find so far. I am suspicious that uninstalling may be an issue, as it was in the past.

Major improvements from the past:

1) The Try & Decide feature now works even if a reboot is required for the newly installed application or system change. The Acronis Try & Decide can truly undo a change in its entirety, even if critical files are over-written, something window's System Restore could never do. But, System Restore could survive a reboot, which in the past Acronis couldn't. Now, all situations are covered by True Image 2010, and I have been able to fearlessly change, upgrade, or install on my system and effortlessly reverse the changes if I don't like the results.

2) USB/multi-boot support is robust. In the past, forgetting to remove a flash drive while using True Image could result in dangerously wacky behavior such as corrupting the master boot record or deleting the C:\ drive. Having a complex computer system, say USB drives and multiple operating systems, was a recipe for disaster. Legacy FAT32 application software also clashed if the Acronis Secure Zone was installed. All these past issues appear to be resolved. I did a backup and fully-bootable disk-image restoration for a Windows XP/Windows 7RC-64-bit multi-boot system using an external USB 2.0 hard drive for storing the images, with other USB flash drives plugged in, and 2 internal SATA hard disks in 4 partitions.

What I didn't test: I didn't make backups to DVD media; Acronis states it is possible make images spanning several DVDs.

Other Thoughts: A reasonable person might wonder why anyone such as myself would give Acronis another chance after the problems of the recent past. There are 2 things about this addition of True Image that I find very valuable compared to other imaging software I've tried: 1) The Try & Decide feature was always useful, but with the improvement to survive reboots it's now the single most important feature for me; I like to try a lot of new configurations, and completely undoing experiments can be easily accomplished. 2) I have use of the computer while backing up, which makes it unobtrusive to do frequent backups.

Backup speed on my system is about 3 gigabytes/minute, so a drive with 120 gigs of data took about 40 minutes to image (and I could still surf the net during the process). Restoring a drive goes at 3 gigs/minutes based upon compressed image size, so a 9 gig image took 3 minutes to restore to the uncompressed size of 20 gigs.

Now, some general words of caution for would be users who are new to the disk imaging game. This type of software works with and independently from the host operating system. By its very nature it is a law unto itself, and the operating system can't really protect you from rogue behavior. The potential for trashing your system is very real. That's why I did extensive testing of True Image 2010 on a fully cloned system. I can't suggest strongly enough that BEFORE you install True Image to your computer's HD you should attempt to make a back up by simply using the bootable True Image CD in your optical drive. If you can't make a back up from the bootable CD, things may go badly should you choose to install True Image 2010 on your computer. Since this sofware interacts directly with the BIOS, be cautious about BIOS upgrades. Keep current with upgrades from Acronis. Finally, it's just a plain good idea to have partition management software (such as Acronis Disk Director or Active @ BootDisk) available for emergency use to recover deleted partitions. Sorry to make it all sound so scary, but any disk imaging software (acronis or not) is powerful stuff. And when things go wrong, the results can be quite bad.

My system as tested: Dual boot Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit/Windows 7 RC 64-bit; Acronis True Image Home 2010 software installed to 64-bit Windows 7 RC partition; Acronis Secure Zone (FAT32) partition installed; Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard w/Intel P45 + ICH10R Chipset and Award BIOS version F7; Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 processor.

300 of 326 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Try several backup programs before you commit to one., October 23, 2009

By 

KD "KD" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Acronis True Image Home 2010 [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

After purchasing a 1TB external USB drive so that I can make backups of my (64bit) laptop's 500GB HDD, I've been trying out many different backup programs.

In the past, I had been using Ghost 2003 (DOS boot floppy) -- which I considered one of the best pieces of software ever created. I never bothered with the actual Window's Ghost 2003 install, other than simply just to create a boot floppy. Once I had a working boot floppy, I uninstalled the Window's Ghost 2003. My preferred method of doing backups is very simply. I simply want to boot into the backup program externally from any installed OS and manually perform backup/restores with an external USB HDD. I have no desire for automated backups. In the past, Ghost 2003 (DOS boot floppy) worked faithfully for me over many years covering (32bit) Win98, Win2000, WinXP, Linux, FreeBSD, and even Vista. While in recent years, I would have to manually repair the MBR and bootloaders after restores with Ghost 2003, it still remained an excellent program. Unfortunately, with the arrival of mainstream 64bit hardware, Ghost 2003 is now obsolete. Even more unfortunate is that Symantec, after borging PowerQuest, completely changed Ghost after 2003. Usually Symantec destroys any product that they acquire, but in this case they destroyed their own product (Ghost) after acquiring PowerQuest DriveImage -- which, just like PowerQuest PartitionMagic, was also an excellent product in it's own right before being borged by Symantec.

After quite a bit of work, I was actually able to get Ghost 2003 to recognize an internal SATA drive, boot from a USB pen drive, and "work" with 64bit hardware, but there were still a few things going "weird". Read the wikipedia Ghost article on how to get all that going if you want to give it a try.

What I am after is likely very common for what many others are after. I simply want to boot up into a backup program from an external source (CD/DVD, USB drive) and be able to do both backup and restores between an internal HDD and an external USB HDD. I don't even want a "main" backup program to have to be installed on an OS. I don't need nor even want automated backups. I certainly don't want the backup program creating any special "recovery partition" on the internal HDD. I just want a simple, and more importantly: reliable, completely external backup/restore solution.

So, my journey to find a replacement for Ghost 2003 has started. After trying out the trials, this is what I have found so far:

Most of the backup programs are finding themselves using the least-common-denominator approach these days, which I find to be quite troubling.

- Ghost (latest version). Absolute complete rubbish. By "simplifying" everything, they have made it more complicated than needs be. Not to mention that my first attempt to install this program resulted in a hang. I had to uninstall and reinstall it. That definitely doesn't start out with much confidence. Ghost no longer allows for the creation of "boot media". Like most other backup programs, you now can only create "recovery media". This is boot media that allows you to do restores, but doesn't allow you to do backups. To do backups, you must run the main Window's Ghost program from an actual installed OS. I find this recent trend to be really, really, really, stupid.

- Acronis TrueImage. Installed fine. Does the "recovery media" allow you to do both backups and restores? I couldn't get the "recovery media" to even work. TI has a bunch of automated backup features, all of which I could care less about. I had two MAJOR problems with TI, however. The first problem is that it did not allow a backup image to be created of my /entire/ HDD (containing multiple OS's). I would have to backup each partition individually. This is inexcusable. I want the option to be able to backup my entire HDD into one image. I want every single bit off the HDD in that image, the MBR and everything. I don't want to have fix MBRs, bootloaders, fstab's, etc, after doing restores. My second major problem with TI is that I could not get the "recovery media" to boot. It hangs after the initial splash screen, with a blinking CAPS LOCK key. I believe it may be a SATA issue, however there has been little response to others with the same problem on Acronis's support forums. This was simply too troublesome for me to continue using TI. I had no confidence with TI. My two stars for TI is because "I didn't like it", obviously because the "recovery media" didn't even work for me.

- Macrium Reflect Free Edition. This is what I finally settled on for now. It works and works rather well, but like Ghost, the "recovery media" only allows for restores. Again, you have to actually be in Windows and running the main program to do backups. However, on the plus side, it does allow the entire HDD (with multiple OS's) to be backed up into a single image. It backed up everything: Vista, XP, Linux, Swap, FreeBSD. I was able to collect enough courage to try out a restore and it went without a hitch. I also made a backup of just the Vista partition, out of caution that I (unlikely) may want to fallback to Vista after the free Win7 upgrade arrives from Toshiba. I'm happy with Macrium Reflect (especially since it is free), but still would like to have the completely external approach. The "recovery media" runs in a Linux environment and loads a little on the slow side, however works well once it is loaded.

- FarStone DriveClone Express. This one seems to be exactly what I am after, however there are no trials to try it out. Willing to take a chance on it and spend the $32 (google for promo). If I do, I'll update this after giving it a spin.

- NTFS Active Boot Disk. This one not only also seemed to be exactly what I was after, but also seemed to really have potential. After downloading and trying out the trial, I am impressed with it for the most part. The actual installed program is simply to create boot media, either on a CD/DVD or on a USB drive. While it may be possible to get the other backup programs' boot media onto a USB drive, I really like how NTFS Active Boot Disk thought out to do it for you. Everything is done from the boot media: backups and restores. There are also quite a few other handy utilities on the boot media. I was able to not only backup the entire HDD (with multiple OS's) into one image, but also individual partitions. If the OS filesytem isn't natively supported by Active Boot Disk, you can still backup as a raw image. This means that this backup program will work with /everything/. The boot media runs in a WinPE environment and loads quickly. The downside on this program is that it is relatively expensive when compared with the others. I really like being able to do everything externally and also boot up from a USB drive on my keychain. Edit add: Now that I have used this program more, I am finding a few rough edges. I have yet to try doing a HDD restore, but I have been doing USB drive restores (which it also supports). The first attempt to restore a USB drive from an image always results in a (-5) error when it attempts to write the partition table, however it works fine on the second attempt. Also some of the WinPE utilities (i.e., File Explorer) give an error when deleting files. This may be from WinPE itself and not necessarily the Active Boot programs. While you can successfully do everything that this program is designed for, some things are needing a little "hand holding" and coercion. I feel as if Active Boot Disk and WinPE could use a little more polish.

Summary: It is unfortunate that there is no longer a single utility out there that simply just works extremely well. I'm finding this problem not only with backup programs, but also other utility programs of recent years. I feel as if software has taken a down turn over the last few years. Programs seem to be "dumbed down" these days and also released before they are fully polished. Try out several backup programs before you commit to one of them. While TrueImage didn't work for me, it may work for you. Give Macrium Reflect Free Edition a try. Many will likely find that this program does everything that need and does it well. Best of all, it is free. If you are like me in that you want a completely external approach to doing manual backups and restores, take a look at NTFS Active Boot Disk and look for reviews for FarStone DriveClone Express.

92 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Avoid at all costs!, October 27, 2009

By 

Ed E. (Phoenix, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Acronis True Image Home 2010 [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

I've been an Acronis user for a long time. I decided to upgrade to True Image 2010 from True Image 10 in preparation for upgrading to Windows 7. I'm running Vista SP2 32 bit on a Dell XPS M1530. This setup has been running very well for me without any problems for over a year. However, this install gave me a blue screen of death right at the end of the install process. A quick search on Google showed that many people were complaining of this problem. Following advice I found from the search, I ended up uninstalling my old version of True Image 10 and using Regedit to manually remove registry settings this install added. This time the software installed. I thought I was home free.

I was wrong. After rebooting and running I got another blue screen of death. I went to the Acronis site to get support and found that I had to PAY TO GET SUPPORT!!! There is no email nor a phone number for support unless you pay! There are support forums, but it's entirely self service and not well monitored by Acronis employees. I resorted to downloading the most recent build to see if that fixed the problem. Nope! Another blue screen of death upon launching the app.

Also, I was getting really irritated at installing the software so many times. The serial number is 64 digits and I had to enter all 64 digits each time. This was adding insult to injury!

Backup software is supposed to provide peace of mind. If I can't even get the app to run without crashing, what would happen when I REALLY needed this app to restore. My data is too valuable. I've returned the software. I'm done with Acronis.

I'm evaluating O&O Disk Image. It installed without any problems. My first backup went smooth. So far so good!