Online Backup Guide

Acronis 2009 Backup and Recovery

Acronis True image 2009 is advancement on an already mature backup and recovery software that was marketed in 2008. The best just got better. The interface does not leave one biting ones nails and apart from some very minor litches, it functions just as well as its predecessor, if not better.

Both Acronis True Image Home 2008 and 2009 target the home and home office users. The software is affordably priced and is very useful in protecting data on home PCs such as family pictures, videos, music and other important documents of the home office.

The Offering

Acronis True Image 2008 had four backup products on offer, so does Acronis True Image 2009.  The disk imaging backup option for creating an image of the hard disk drive including the operating system applications, user setting and data; file based backup option to backup and restore individual files and folders; Application settings backup and messenger settings backups. A number of wizards have been built into the application to help walk the user through the process of backup.

Disaster recovery options

The earlier and the current version of this software allow users create bootable media on floppy disks, CDs or flash drives; create and schedule backup procedure for protecting information and recovering data in case of system failure. Data can also be saved to a special partition on the hard drive called the Acronis Secure Zone and the system can be rebooted from this zone by pressing F11 to recover the system.  The backups can be run even when the computer is in use and the entire PC can be restored in minutes from the image of the system at a point in time.

Backup status reports

Users can also receive email notifications on the backup status.

Acronis True Image System Protection

Features

Acronis True Image 2009 builds upon the existing framework of Acronis 2008 with additional features.

The Standard offerings

Both these applications support storage in hard disk drives; network storage drives; ftp servers, CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW; Zip, Jazz and other removable media; PATA(IDE), SATA, SCSI, SAS), IEEE1394; and FireWire, USB 1.0/2.0 drives and PC Card. Both applications work well with Windows Vista, Windows XP with SP2. The minimum requirement is Pentium processor with 256 MB of RAM, 200 MB free space and 30 MB for installation and a CD-RW drive for bootable media creation. The applications support FAT16/32, NTFS, Linux® Ext2/Ext3, ReiserFS, Linux Swap and provide Raw Images support for other partitions and corrupted file systems.

New Features

Try and Decide

The Try and Decide feature was added to the Acronis True Image 2009 to try out software or system changes in the Acronis Safe zone before applying the changes to the PC.

Selective backup option

An option to exclude some files and folders from the image backup was also built into the application. This helps save space when creating backups and ensures that unnecessary information is not backed up.

Backup of System and Registry files

The new Acronis True image 2009 also backups the system state including registry, boot files and other important system files.  Additionally the new application also maintains a
catalog of all the backups automatically and enables locating the archives in the system.  New features of the Recovery facet of the application include Message level outlook restore; search engine for exploring archives and preservation of file sand folders during restore.

Raw image support

Added to all this backup prowess is the ability to provide Raw Images support for other partitions and corrupt file systems.

Increased User-friendliness

Management of the backup and restore operation has also been made easy.  Users can now set and forget backup procedures.  Configuration needs to be done only once and the backups will be automatically monitored and created and the traffic light on the screen will remain green so long as everything is on schedule.  Advanced scheduling features can be used to start backup on user idle, login/logout or other events.  The system can be set to automatically protect itself from potentially dangerous changes. With the new Acronis True Image 2009 backups can also be scheduled for validation periodically.

Acronis True Image Home 2009

Privacy Protection
Finally the new application protects privacy by adding new features for regularly cleansing the drive of sensitive data if the drive has to be returned or given to another for use. The Acronis Drive Cleanser will ensure that no private information can be harvested from the drive. File shredder can be used to wipe private and confidential data in individual files using new multi pass algorithms. System clean up can be used to protect privacy by cleaning out activity track that is stored by Windows.

The Verdict

For those have used the Acronis True Image 2008, the new version will seem familiar and the new features will seem a bonus!  For those purchasing or trying out Acronis True Image 2009 for the first time it will be a pleasure in store.