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| Acronis True Image 11 Home [OLD VERSION] | ![Acronis True Image 11 Home [OLD VERSION]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51iwyudQDXL._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | From: Acronis
Category: Software
List Price: $49.95
Buy New: $29.99
You Save: $19.96 (40%)
New (5) from $29.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  189 reviews
Sales Rank: 125
Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Windows Xp
Media: CD-ROM
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.3
MPN: 2229212
Model: 890204002043
UPC: 890204002029
EAN: 0890204002029
ASIN: B000VLZCEW
Release Date: October 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Trashes Operating System September 16, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I used the 15-day trial version from the Acronis website and it crashed my PC and made it unuseable. This is a full version that is only enabled for 15 days.
I have been using Norton Ghost 9.0 for some time now and it worked flawlessly. However, with my new PC, which contains only SATA drives and only USB ports for the keyboard/mouse, Norton Ghost crashed. It started ok and went into PC DOS as it was supposed to, but then it hung. I could not get out of this hung state. The GHREBOOT utility provided by Norton to get out of this hung state did not work. GDISK didn't work either. (Norton Ghost 9.0, with the latest updates, is supposed to work with SATA drives.) Ghost changed my drive letters such that D: is now the operating system. I left it as the D: drive and reloaded Windows XP Home. It never created the Ghost image.
After running True Image, my PC crashed again. It backed up everything ok (or so it says). But when I attempted a restore, it displayed "NTLDR is missing" and "press CTRL-ALT-DEL to continue" which put me in an endless loop. Upon futher examination, True Image scrambled my disks and moved the operating system back to the C: drive.
For some reason, the Repair function on Windows did not repair the operating system during either crash.
So I suggest you take advantage of the trial version before spending your money on the full version.
 Convenient and Easy to Use September 15, 2008
Heard about this product from my outsourced tech support. It installed easily; very intuitive; worked exactly as advertised. Very pleased with this product. Anyone who should back up their software or data files should buy this software (everyone!).
Acronis True Image 11 Home September 13, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I received the product very quickly and it was in perfect condition. I've already used it and am totally happy with it. Thanks
 Acronis Drive Images - A Beginner's Guide September 13, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
SUMMARY: Acronis image backup (Acronis True Image) can be easier than making duplicate boot drives to save your butt when the box won't boot, but a cloned spare boot drive should come first on anyone's list, and many programs will make one.
THE PROBLEM
Windows operating systems are fragile and deteriorate with use, especially as applications are installed and uninstalled. Data backup does not protect the operating system itself. Everyone needs drive-image backup (copies physical platter cylinders and sectors) and data or file-oriented backup (copies files pointed to by directories maintained by the operating system). Of these two, only drive image backup can restore the operating system of a PC which will not boot.
A data backup's inability to restore a failed operating system means that installed programs cannot be restored either. If either an installed program or the operating system fail, they must be reinstalled and customized from scratch if no drive image is available.
Doing this is not easy.
Finding the CD or a download site on the Web to restore a program is easier than finding your lost serial number (unlock code), and that's easier than reconfiguring e-mail accounts, address books, and all the customizations we make to major applications (e.g., Photoshop) -- the plug-ins, macros, menus, etc. In short, we all work in highly-customized environments now. Being able to boot any box off a thumb drive may enable you to see the drives again and stumble through thousands of files, but it does not restore your personal working environment.
There has to be a better way.
MAKE A SPARE BOOT DRIVE
Get your photos and music and videos off the drive from which you boot your PC. Put a separate "media drive" into your PC, or buy a family server (NAS, "Network-Attached Storage") or use external storage.
Now your Windows boot drive can be 80, even just 40G. Copy it.
To clone your boot drive, Acronis Drive Image works fine. Put an extra drive into the PC, go to the tool or utilities menu, choose "manage hard drives" and make the new drive into a clone, do not just store a drive image somewhere. Paragon Drive Copy works fine, there are many choices for copying the entire working drive's layout and contents onto new hardware. No all programs copy all sectors on a failing drive so that forensics and recovery of lost (erased) or damaged files can be performed. But that is not our task here.
Switch drives. Boot off the clone. As other reviewers have said, if you can't restore from the backup -- here, if you can't boot from the cloned drive -- it is worthless.
Leave the new drive where it is, and put the original drive away as a spare. If you are paranoid (fire), give it to a neighbor or rent a safe-deposit box. If you are forgetful, put it in the bottom of the PC case with a label on it where you'll stumble across it later. You know you can always boot from it, because it has been your normal boot drive for weeks -- that is, unless you change the hardware.
You will learn how long this should take (15 minutes, perhaps). If a pair of drives takes much longer to copy (hours), then one of them is defective. Buy new drives onto which to write clones. Then you know your old drive was wearing out. If you can get through the cloning operation (overnight?), then you've saved the drive -- and need to make a second copy after booting on the first, because the original drive is nearing failure. Break out the champagne because you've just pulled the entire PC from the jaws of death.
When you can restore a bootable, already-customized operating system with all your applications and **their** supporting data and customizations intact, then the fact that the restore point is stale by a month or more is easily dealt with. That's what data backups are for.
THE ACRONIS PROMISE
You are now treating 80G drives as floppies -- every PC in the house has a spare boot drive in the bottom, there's a stack of free drives for future use on the shelf. Making a copy requires physically connecting a new drive.
Acronis promises to make life easier than this.
Acronis makes drive images. It knows how to read every sector on a drive and store information which normally never leaves a drive (partition table, master boot record), and some of which must be written back to physically specified places (cylinder zero). You can't ask Windows to give you this kind of hardware-level control. Acronis uses very specialized, powerful technology. We should support the company as it climbs its learning curve, but please read on and don't repeat my mistakes.
The Acronis promise is to make drive images very fast which are very small (OK, they're gigabytes, but smaller than the original), and to use them to create physical drives **when you need them** so that you don't have to buy stacks of hard drives and treat them like floppies for backing up systems.
The Acronis promise opens up the possibility of making copies of our computers "as purchased new" and then as they change (are customized) month by month. Instead of being pushed back to a fresh install and a full customization any time any machine won't boot, we can roll back to an earlier operating system, write that system to a physical drive, and run the machine from that drive. The Acronis promise opens the possibility of making **image backups** with the ease and automation we usually associate only with data backups. But this kind of backup can save the entire customized user environment, opsys and all, not just the data.
THE ACRONIS REALITY
1. Just make simple whole-drive copies. Do not make incremental or differential backups. Do not make special partitions on any drive to hold backups or special boot facilities (the Acronis "vault", Acronis "Secure Zone"). Do not put more than one partition in a single True Image file, in order to preserve your freedom to change the size and file technology (FAT, NT) to suit the target drive and machine during restore.
If a drive fails but you have saved an image and put that image on a new physical drive that boots, you may think you have a perfect clone. But you do not, and all your incremental backup files are invalid. The problem is that both Acronis and Windows (the Master File Table's Bad Sectors file) keep track of bad sectors. Differences in which sectors are bad on the two different drives will be indistinguishable from which sectors have changed due to genuine data revisions. The result is corrupted files.
This software is complex. Even if it were bug-free and you knew what was happening when it was silent and you could understand the messages when it spoke, Acronis must still make assumptions that are not valid for every machine. Acronis True Image will sometimes fail, as other reviewers have noted. Keep what you do simple. When you deal with the company, tell them to bullet-proof what they already have and stop adding new features that burden them and us.
2. Store the copies where you can get them.
You must have a second machine with Acronis Drive Image installed, which can read your drive images, to which you can connect a new physical drive, onto which you can write an image that boots another PC. You must go back to that PC, take out the no-boot drive, and put the newly generated drive in. Cross your fingers and boot.
If you changed hardware, do you know when? Do you know which images are now no longer valid and which will work?
Do not expect Acronis to write these images across the network if you have many home PCs and some are running older versions of Windows than others. If you've been thinking about upgrading to GigE hubs and a multi-terabyte family server, perhaps now is the time.
OK, it's not easy, but you are saving yourself weeks of work and possible heartbreak. Now that you see it's not easy, copying drives without Acronis by physically hanging them on a machine and keeping stacks of them around like floppy disks doesn't seem so bizarre anymore, does it? There are cards with external SATA sockets -- you don't even have to open the case, and you get a real drive, not a USB external.
3. Your drive image is not Known Good until it is written to a physical drive that boots.
Acronis is the missing shake-down test for any PC. You can validate memory with Knoppix and memtest86. You can validate CPU speed and over-temperature with PRIME95. What they tell you is true. You can pass all tests with safety margins and not get through Acronis because nothing exercises the hard drive system as rigorously as Acronis does. After failure to validate a multi-gigabyte drive image with Acronis, you need to think about running the Front Side Bus slower.
PCs have a Front Side Bus (FSB) that is normally set to match the speed of the DRAM (memory sticks). The interface between CPU and memory sticks is through a large chip known generically as the Northbridge. However, the FSB also sets the rate of another large chip (the Southbridge) that drives a lot of other key, fast peripherals such as the disk drives and the LAN (Ethernet) ports.
Acronis drive-image software is fast, complex software and it can flush out errors in a PC's drive controller systems that you never knew were there. Your drive images won't validate, and even if you validate them, they may not generate a bootable physical drive.
The solution to failing images is to reduce the speed of the FSB if your BIOS chipset permits this and you know how to call up and re-configure a BIOS. Again, drives in PCs that are reliable (or seem reliable . . .) for ordinary daily tasks may write erroneous sectors when driven hard by Acronis.
After slowing down the FSB for the sake of the hard drive controller chip(s), it makes sense to speed up memory by speeding up RAS and CAS delays -- this only gets the memory system back to where it was so that Acronis doesn't force a performance hit on the rest of the PC.
SUMMARY
Buy Acronis True Image but use it for the basic task of making a complete image of a single partition. Don't assume the more advanced features will work in your particular environment. You do not have a "known good" image until you have created a new drive from scratch and booted your PC from it. If you can do this once and don't see any delays or bad sector error messages, then you can probably trust an image that you have "only" validated and not written onto a drive.
Try a different product September 6, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have windows xp home edition... It seems to do what it says but whenever I put a schedule backup it constantly changes my settings particularily when I reboot. It defaults to windows xp theme, changes my wallpaper, changes my screen saver and changes my sound scheme. I uninstalled and reinstalled 3 times to confirm that this issue was related to the program.
I try to reset my wall paper and it changes my theme. I try to change my theme and it changes my wallpaper. I try to change my sound scheme and it changes.....
It's annoying... Try a different product....
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