Acronis True Image Home 10

INTRODUCTION

Imagine if you will the following scenario: It's a Friday afternoon and you've had a long, hard week at work. You come home and after doing your honey-dos you settle in to killing as many aliens as you possibly can in your favorite game to rid yourself of the week's frustration and prepare for the glorious weekend ahead. About 15 minutes into the carnage you begin to hear a high pitched squeaking noise coming from your trusty computer. Probably a fan that you can change out later, right? You continue your activity and all of a sudden you hear a noise that is reminiscent of crunching corn flakes in a blender and your system freezes. You're a computer enthusiast and built this rig from scratch and can easily troubleshoot and fix what's wrong! Well not exactly, your hard drive has just gone from 7200 RPM to around 100 RPM and your operating system, programs, and most importantly years worth of data have just been destroyed.

While maybe just a tad melodramatic, this scenario does happen! I know this for a fact as a few years ago I experienced it. I had three hard drives in my system at the time and two of them held my primary data running in RAID 0. The end result, all was lost and could not be recovered. Had I followed a common sense backup regime, I could have simply replaced the drives and restored my most recent backup and been back to fragging bad guys in an hour tops. Instead I lost everything and had to start over again from scratch. I was a true nonbeliever in Murphy's Law and now I'm one of it's biggest supporters.

Granted the technology in hard drives has gotten much better and fortunately this type of scenario doesn't happen that often anymore. The question is are you willing to risk it? Well I'm not! Since that unfortunate day I have been Chairman of the Board in the "School of Backup". Along the way I have used several products to facilitate my peace of mind, for the last three years I have put all of my eggs in the Acronis basket and have yet to have one cracked. Please join me today as we at Bjorn3d review Acronis's latest release of their home based product, Acronis True Image 10. We'll be using build 4942 which is the latest product update released on March 12, 2007.

I'll warn you in advance this is one of the most complete software reviews we at Bjorn3D have ever done; it's lengthy but we hope quite useful to you in making a decision with regard to backup archival software.

Acronis: The Company

Acronis offers storage management solutions that are technically advanced for mission-critical applications but easy to use. The company provides disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning, boot management, privacy, data migration, and other storage management products for enterprises, corporations and consumers of any qualification. Acronis has offices in the United States, Europe and Asia and sells its products through retail outlets, resellers and on the Web.