Backup luv

Finally I have found a backup program I can love - Acronis True Image 10.0 (Home). The praise may be slightly premature since I've yet to apply the product in a restoration situation but so far I can say that True Image is at once both powerful, fast and yeah - SIMPLE! That last one is really important to me, not because I have problems understanding stuff like backup sets, volumes and sessions (terms my current solution EMC/Dantz Retrospect uses), but because everyone I recommend a backup solution to must be able to use it without needed to call me to do a restore for them.

I've previously used Acronis' disk migration tools with zero problems and have always been impressed with their simplicity. I really don't have any doubts that True Image will be able to restore its partition images without problems. And I've always longed for something as simple as a whole partition backup solution for fast and easy whole disk restoration after a drive crash (something that seems to be in the air at the moment) while maintaining the ability to restore single files and folders if necessary. That Acronis does this, and incremental and differential backups is even better. That they have a completely straightforward backup scheduling interface is even better still. That I can not only browse a backup but also mount it as a regular lettered drive and use it is just icing on the cake.

So far I've been very impressed with the blinding speed of Acronis backups, to my local Firewire external drive it is storing about 1GB (that's one gigabyte) per minute or 133 Gbits per second - probably about 1/3 the theoretical max but far in excess of what I've ever managed to get out of Retrospect. So one of my typical desktop machines with about 40GB used can be completeley backed up at the partition level and read verified in under an hour - something I can easily afford to schedule every day. My standard two week alternating schedule with weekly complete backup and daily incremental or differential is even easier to contemplate. Acronis provides further flexibility by allowing scheduled backups to run at a latter date if the computer is off at the time of the scheduled backup - something that Retrospect expects you to shell big extra bucks for (boooo).

Thus far the only thing I've found missing in the True Image Home product is some kind of email notificaiton of backup warnings or errors. I think that isn't really essential for a home backup system, its more something that is useful for remotely managed machines and hence falls into the enterprise category that Acronis have a whole different product version for.

One would be tempted to compare this product to Norton Ghost which has been around for years. I've used earlier versions of Ghost in a purely archival mode and been less than impressed. It was slow and installation of any Norton product is always horrendously intrusive since Norton seems to want to take over your entire machine and push every single Norton add-on product down your throat. Ghost now has a "Save and Restore" version with a more Backup focused market in mind but comes in at $69.99 per computer and does not appear to have incremental or differential capabilities that Acronis is offering. Given my previous bad experiences of everything Norton I think I'll give it a wide miss...

Even though at $49.95 per computer True Image will cost more than Retrospect for a family or small business with more than three computers I think I'll be recommending it in the future, assuming some trial drive restorations go okay. My hat is off to Acronis for releasing such a solid, powerful and yet simple product that really can be used by a typical home user.