True Image

This article needs additional citations for verification., Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2010) Acronis True Image , Acronis True Image Home 2009 Stable releaseHome version: 2011(2010) / September 9, 2010; 7 months ago (2010-09-09) Development statusActive Operating systemWindows XP, Vista, Windows 7 PlatformWindows and Linux for live imaging., Recovery CD runs on any x86 machine. Available inEnglish, French and German TypeDisk cloning software LicenseCommercial proprietary WebsiteAcronis True Image Home Acronis True Image is disk imaging software, developed by Acronis, that creates backups and recovers PC systems. The software allows a user to create an image of a disk while it is running Microsoft Windows or offline by booting from CD/DVD, USB flash drives, PXE, or other bootable media. As a disk imaging software, True Image can restore the previously captured image to another disk, replicating the structure and contents to the new disk, also allowing disk cloning and partition resizing, as well if the new disk is of different capacity. History, True Image is known for its simple, wizard driven interface, and received positive and mixed reviews from both editors and users alike. The first version of True Image was launched into the market of drive backup software in 2002 and could create a drive image that was running without shutting down to DOS mode. The other features were an ability to write an image to DVDs, a drive image creation within Windows and support for a wide range of storage options. Acronis True Image 2010, added a new option of online backup that saves user's backups to a secure remote location. Operation, As a disk imaging software, True Image offers functionality such as restoring data or creating a drive image without rebooting the system. In case of operating system error or hard disk failure, the PC can be booted to the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager, which returns the system to a previous point in time. True Image creates exact backups of a hard drive sector-by-sector, therefore providing faster restore of user's operating systems, data, settings, applications, etc. The program can back up a system hard drive while the OS is running. It recovers a computer after the system crash and boots it by pressing the F11 key. Acronis True Image offers several different options for system recovery, including the retrieval of lost files or other chunks of data, as well as entire system recovery due to corruption or failure. The following is a quick list of methods: True Image can access files within an existing image file by mounting the image file as if it were a disk, in either read-only or read-write mode. This enables the user to quickly copy data files from the image file back to the local system. A virtual device driver must be installed in the operating system in order to use the mounting feature, but this driver is installed during the original installation of True Image. Separately, files can be read from and, in read-write mode, written to the image, which effectively creates an incremental file, and has the advantage of leaving the original image files untouched by saving the changes in a new file., True Image offers a bootable media wizard, which creates a recovery environment to CD or other media, and is used to boot the machine to a proprietary environment for quick recovery. While this method also provides the ability to recover lost data, the primary focus is restoring the complete system back to a given point in time in case of complete failure., The Acronis Secure Zone is a bootable, hidden partition option created and managed by True Image. This space, which is not accessible to the user or other applications such as malware, is used to store the backup image files. The Secure Zone can be created as bootable, enabling the user to boot directly into the recovery environment by pressing the F11 key, very useful when the machine doesn't contain a CD drive or other access to external media., The recent version of True Image 2010 offers an online backup feature, providing optional off-site data protection and recovery., Versions, Acronis has published their Version Comparison Acronis True Image Home 6.0 (2002). The version supports creation of disk image on recordable DVD media and external USB drives., Acronis True Image Home 7.0 (2003) offers an innovative wizard-driven interface, which guides a user through the whole process of backing up. Moreover, this version supports a disk cloning feature, allowing cloning hard drive to another one directly, saving PC resources and time., Acronis True Image Home 8.0 (2004) includes options of saving disk image on a remote computer or laptop, and an ability to restore files by exploring an image file., Acronis True Image Home 9.0 (2005) includes the SecureZone, which allows backing up an image to a hidden drive partition, making it inaccessible to viruses and most hackers. Another feature, Startup Recovery Manager, helps to configure user's system, letting boot it up and restore itself without a separate boot disk., Acronis True Image Home 10.0 (2006) releases new abilities to back up and restore directly to the network share and FTP. It also can save archives of Outlook and Outlook Express, including a user's Windows Address Book., Acronis True Image Home 11 (2007) This version provides users with more options, such as File Shredder that destroys individual files so they can't be resurrected and Try&Decide feature, allowing user to create a temporary, safe place on a hard drive where any changes of the system can be performed., Acronis True Image Home 2009 provides a one-click protection that allows a user to back up a computer or laptop a click away. The other features, such as Windows Vista style and an option of full text search, let the inexperienced users perform drive imaging and disk cloning operations easily., Acronis True Image Home 2010 provides the following new options, consisting of Acronis Nonstop Backup, which provides continuous data protection, Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) and Microsoft Windows 7 support. This version offers Acronis Online Backup, an optional feature, allowing to back up important data to an online vault., Acronis True Image Home 2011. The latest version of True image includes the following new features: Redesigned GUI, full Windows 7 Integration; USB 3.0 support; Predefined Backup Schemes and Check Points for Acronis Backup Explorer., Acronis True Image 2010, Along with its hard drive cloning and imaging features, new options include Virtual Hard Disk and Microsoft Windows 7 support, Acronis Nonstop Backup, and the ability to back up online as well. The improved scheduling option allows specifying dates of a tasks running and copying them to the planning calendar. New features: New FeaturesDescription Acronis Nonstop Backup Continuous backup process. This feature creates backups automatically every five minutes, so that users can spin back their data, settings and system files to any time point in the past. Support for Microsoft Windows 7 This feature brings more functionality over built-in back up capacities of Microsoft Windows 7. It helps a user who is planning on upgrading the OS over to Windows 7 migrate all files and data by creating an exact image of the previous system. Virtual HD Support The function converts backup images of True Image (.tib format) into .vhd, which is a virtual hard disk file of Microsoft Virtual PC and vice versa. However, users cannot run their systems as virtual machines. Acronis Online Backup An additional option lets users save their backups to a remote secure destination. This service allows choosing the files to back up from the installed True Image 2010 and then they are copied right to the online vault. Acronis states the highest government level of security. Compatibility, Acronis True Image 2010 provides backward compatibility for image files created with Acronis True Image 2009 and Acronis True Image 8.0 to 11; that is, images created with one of these versions can be successfully restored. Competing Products, RollBack Rx, Problems, If the feature "Nonstop Backup" (introduced in Acronis True Image 2010) is used to create a backup on a USB drive, it turns off automatically after a while and with early builds of Acronis True Image Home 2010 it also causes a blue screen. Although Acronis always promised to fix "Nonstop Backup" in version 2010 (and has indeed fixed the blue screen problem) the feature is still not working after many months. Meanwhile Version 2011 is released and although Acronis states that "Nonstop Backup" is working now, users of versions 2010 and 2011 alike vehemently disagree (while the feature is still heavily advertised). Due to the proprietary nature of the file format, disaster recovery options are limited to the use of Acronis software. This is a problem if backups need to be accessed by third-party entities or restored on future operating system versions, that might not be supported by Acronis. There seems to be no open source tool to extract the archive files, that would remedy this situation. Supported storage media and systems, Operating systems Windows XP SP3, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows Vista SP2 (all editions), Windows 7 (all editions), Storage media Hard disk drives, Networked storage devices, FTP servers, CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R (including double-layer DVD+R), DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, BD-R, BD-RE, USB 1.0 / 2.0, FireWire (IEEE-1394) and PC card storage devices, ZIP, Jaz and other removable media, Supported filesystems, File systems supported by software: NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, Linux Swap, In addition to the officially supported filesystems, Acronis True Image also provides raw sector backup and restore options for all other filesystems. 'Raw' mode provides support for a file system that is corrupt, or that isn't officially supported, by capturing a complete image of all sectors on the disk. This method results in a larger image file as it isn't able to compress, resize, or selectively restore files on the unrecognized filesystem.

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