Bits & Bytes is the monthly newsletter edited by David Chalmers for KIPUG members.
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Below please read an article written by our club president Mike Turner.
Acronis True Image 10 Home
Review by Mike Turner
A few months back Gene Barlow of User Group Relations http://www.ugr.com gave us a great presentation on the importance of backing up your computer files. At the end of the meeting Gene gave away a package consisting of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home http://www.acronis.com and his Perfect Backup Approach training CD. I was very excited to win this package because my wifes computer was really beginning to worry me. My wife had hundreds of unbacked up files on her computer that she had created for her Sweet Adeline Chorus, many of which had taken her hours to create. I really needed to back up her computer.
Since the copy of Acronis True Image 10 Home that I won had sat around on my desk for a couple of months I am such a procrastinator the first thing I decided to do was check and see if there was any updates to True Image 10 Home. Imagine my surprise to find that not only was there a update but it was a major update that made Acronis True Image 10 Home compatible with Microsoft's new Vista Operating System. The download although fairly large at around a 102 Megabytes went fairly quickly and yes it was the whole program not just a update file.
After burning the file to a CD I installed Acronis True Image 10 Home on my wifes computer which is a older machine with a 2.5 Gigahertz Celeron Processor and running Windows 2000. The install went with out a hitch. Acronis True Image 10 Home has a nice splash screen that give you the options of installing Acronis True Image 10, or reading the Users Guide, it even has a link to Technical Support which is a nice touch. Clicking the Install Button brings up a pretty standard Wizard asking for you to click on the EUL, and enter the Serial Number. One screen has three buttons on it Typical, Custom, and Complete. I chose complete which installs Rescue Media Builder, Acronis True Image 10 Home and Bart PE, for a total install of 216 Megabytes. The typical install doesn't install Bart PE but I figures for the extra 512 Bytes I might as well go for the whole enchilada and install everything. The next screen asks you if you want to make a backup of all users of the computer or only of just the user profile using the computer. This would be handy for a computer that has multiple user profiles but since my wife is the only user I choose all users of the computer. Finally there is a proceed button which installs Acronis True Image 10 Home which took about 2 or 3 minutes and then a pop up screen asks to reboot the computer.
After the computer reboot you can click on the Acronis True Image 10 Home Shortcut button on the desktop which brings up the main program Screen. The Main program screen is in two columes, on the Left side is a series of menus such as Pick a Category, Tools, and Help. I noticed that Help is context sensitive. These menus have various links in them giving you access to other parts of the program. The Right hand side has a similar set of menus that let you pick a task such as Backup or Recovery, you can also choose various task managers and tools. The screen looks confusing at first glance but after looking at it for a few minutes I realized that each task has a little explanation attached to it that makes it easy to figure what buttons do what.
I decided that I was going to make a back up of my wifes computer to a USB Hard Drive since I want to have Acronis True Image 10 Home schedule regular incremental backup of this computer. First I clicked on the button labeled backup, which opened the backup wizard. The first Screen asks you to choose the type of backup you want to make the choices are Full Backup, Incremental Backup, or Differential Backup, each choice has a explanation of the type of backup it makes. I chose the incremental backup first but Acronis True Image 10 Home wouldn't let me make a incremental backup until I had made the full backup so I chose the full backup button. The next screen wanted a backup type the choices were, My Computer, My Data, My Applications, or My Email, I choose My Computer and clicked next. The next screen already had my C: drive selected so I simply hit next and went on to the next screen which asked for the Archive Location. This screen is setup like Windows explorer I choose my USB Hard drive, but there is lots of choices, I could have burned the archive to CD or DVD or chose one of my network shares. Acronis True Image 10 Home will even create a secure partition on the hard drive for you to put the archive in. Once you have chosen the location you have to create a name for your backup file this is a little confusing because the button to do this is kind of hidden at the end of the space for the location. The next screen allows you to add comments to the Archive like the name of the computer and the date you created the archive. Finally you click on the Proceed button and Acronis True Image 10 Home starts to make the archive. It took almost 2 hours for Acronis True Image 10 Home to make the backup archive of my wifes computer.
There is one thing about Acronis True Image 10 Home that I find very intresting Acronis True Image 10 Home makes it's image not only while Windows is running but while you are using it my wife tells me that there is no more a hit on performance on her computer when Acronis True Image 10 Home is making one of the scheduled incremental backups than when her Antivirus program is running doing a full scan.
My next task was to setup the scheduling of incremental backups in Acronis True Image 10 Home. From the main menu I chose Tasks and then clicked on the Create button in the task bar. You guessed it up came the Schedule task wizard which walked me through setting up scheduled incremental backups. The first few screens were very similar to the screens that I used to setup the original full backup asking me what type of Schedule I wanted. I just let Acronis True Image 10 Home pick standard options and I was able to scheduled weekly incremental backups for 11AM on Saturday mornings if the computer is not on it will make those backups the next time the computer is turned on.
Here is a little secret if you go to Tools Options Notifications Email in the file menu at the top of the screen you can have Acronis True Image 10 Home send you a Email every time it makes a successful backup of the computer. This feature is very easy to setup just type in your Email address and the SMTP Server and click the check boxes.
I am very happy with Acronis True Image 10 Home it does every thing that I want in backup software to do and there are a whole bunch of other stuff that it will do that I haven't had time to explore, for instance Acronis True Image 10 Home will clone your hard drive very handy when you want to move from that puny 500 Gigabyte hard drive to your new terabyte hard drive.
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