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True Image Home 2011 PC Backup and Recovery [Old Version]
by Acronis
Software SummaryManufacturer: Acronis
Brand: Acronis
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: CD-ROM
Release Date: 2010-09-01
Platform: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP
Model: TI-14-DV-RT-W-EN
Product features: - Reliable backup and recovery software for complete PC protection
- Intuitive graphical interface; create copies of hard drive with just a few quick steps while continuing to work
- Optimizations for Windows 7 make navigation faster; convenient Set&Forget scheduling
- Try&Decide creates safe environment to try new software and browse the Web
- Automatically creates incremental backups--roll back system, files, and folders to any point in time
Software Reviews of True Image Home 2011 PC Backup and Recovery [Old Version]Customer Review: Good capabilities, poor implementation
Summary: 3 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Back in the mainframe days, sophisticated backup schemes were needed for the less reliable disks of the day, the time critical nature of recovering from crashes, and the efficient use of resources needed when backing up data. Full backups, monthly backups, as well as daily and weekly ones were done with combinations of complete disk images, incremental and differential backup methods, as well as backups of changed sectors for types of files that were updated in place. With the advent of PCs, backup schemes were almost an afterthought. Little more was available than programs that essentially copied files to alternate sources, possibly tracking which ones had changed since the most recent backup (often with the unreliable attribute bit controlled by MS-DOS), or with full image backups that could be used for nothing but complete restores.
Over the years, Acronis has brought back the sophisticated capabilities of backup software that once needed professional operators to run, and put them into a product with a relatively friendly user interface. By that, I mean an interface that can be used by most sophisticated users, but leaving the more basic functions as the only viable options for novice users. In the 2011 version, Acronis chose to redesign the interface to make it more accessible to their target audience.
Initially, the new design seemed like a big improvement over the old one, especially for new users. Much of what can now be found in a central location was formerly found in discrete and not necessarily obvious areas of the program. There were also many embarrassing errors in syntax, such as the company's inability to know when to use "back up" as opposed to "backup." Isn't that their core business? The new interface cleaned up a lot of the old problems, yet I soon found that many messages were cryptic, confusing, or downright wrong (sometimes due to the author's inability to distinguish among tenses in English.) Also, some of the interface is oversimplified to the point of confusion. For example, the destination to be restored to is indicated in a box with an unlabeled arrow pointing to it. On a slower system you might notice an ephemeral message telling you what's being pointed to. The method of naming a backup set in more detail has become so idiosyncratic that I won't bother going into it.
When converting from the 2010 version, the 2011 version kept the old configuration data, the scheduled and non scheduled tasks, as well as specific backups done by Acronis or Windows itself and used a garbage can approach to display the information in one place. For new users with an empty slate, that organization might be well suited. But it creates a jumbled mess for experienced users. In my case, I ended up with a long list of relevant data, as well as 207 entries for what's called "reserve copy entries." The latter is a more advanced concept, and each one is treated as a separate backup. Seeing hundreds of unneeded entries on a list, with the useful ones interspersed anywhere from the top to the bottom, is frustrating.
Initially, performance was terrible. There was no way to limit the view of information by category, such as scheduled tasks, unscheduled ones, or all available backups. There was no way of trimming items from the list except one at a time, or way too many items at a time without sufficient differentiation. Just about every action I took caused the application to hang for minutes at a time, and that was just navigating the user interface, deleting items from a list and so forth. Whenever the screen finally did return to a usable state, I had to drill down through the menus again with a mouse rather than having the benefit of keyboard shortcuts.
It turned out that all the data is kept in a single XML file, and Acronis did not do a good job of figuring out how to work with this non-database structure in an efficient manner. Any item I removed from the task list required the product to rewrite an extremely large file in its entirety with a few lines removed. I tried editing the file by hand to get rid of the unwanted entries. That caused performance to improve dramatically. Unfortunately, there were unwanted side effects, so I had the product wipe out the list completely so I could start from scratch. When things were still quirky, I used the product's restore capability to put my system back to where it was before I edited the file. Its ability to do so efficiently is one of the products paramount strengths.
The list of backups and scheduled tasks shows much of what is needed for given entries, but there's still a lot missing, and no mouseover capability to get specifics. It's not difficult to see them by going down another level for a given backup entry, but there's no way to see much of the overall information at a glance. To make matters worse, once a backup is either queued or running, even less information is shown. The status bar replaces basic information such as the location of the backup. So if you have a C disk backup to the network drive, and another to your external drive, you won't be able to know which one is running. Unlike the old version, there is no pop out status window. But unlike the previous versions, the program DOES allow you to perform certain actions while a backup is running. My experience was not problem free, but this aspect was a move in the right direction.
In some cases things failed for no clear reason. The product sometimes gave no clear error message but merely gave a message number to be researched. Yet the company's own website often had no information for certain error message numbers. Sometimes it gave ambiguous advice about what to do to the disk (do they mean the one I am backing up or the one I am trying to put my backup on for example) and sometimes said nothing but that they were aware of the problem, had no fix and could not reproduce it.
Although the backup and restore capabilities themselves can be phenomenal, they are worthless if your backup lacks integrity. Unfortunately, that can happen easily. I've come across that issue many times with both the current and earlier versions, and often did not know about it until it was too late. Fortunately, it never left me at a total loss, since a corrupted or missing incremental backup does not prevent recovery from the system state as it was a day before the first bad or missing file. If you back up to more than one place, you are a bit safer. With most backup products, such as the one built into Windows 7, the tray area will show you an alert when the backup had a problem. Acronis offers no such feature. If you "set it and forget it," things are supposed to work. But without opening the user interface, you might not know about a failure. Unlike the previous version, which had a calendar style display showing at a glance on which days things worked or failed, the new version gives less information. In all fairness, there is an option to have the product email you after each task. So if you back up your C, D and F drives on three different computers in your house, you can expect nine emails a day to clutter your mailbox, with no clear indication of which computer the email is referring to in many cases. If you don't check email diligently, this is not a viable solution.
This version also lets you integrate with Windows 7 backup, so the built in Windows backup that you see in the control panel is replaced with the more efficient and versatile Acronis one. Unfortunately, it does not necessarily replace your "system backup" such as your C drive, but replaces things with the last backup you used, such as this week's recorded TV programs on another disk. Replacing Windows backup is a bad idea, and you may wish to run the default one occasionally to be on the safe side.
If you start with a clean slate, and have the product find backups on your disks, either manually or automatically, you will not have any associated scheduled tasks. Acronis makes things easier with a menu option for recreating the backup settings. But the process does not look at what's in the backups, so the preselected choices may be completely wrong. If you have a backup of your F disk, and want to create a scheduled task for it, the default action for the product will be to preselect your C drive and leave the F drive unchecked. This does not create undue work for the user, but can be confusing and could cause problems for users who are not paying close enough attention.
The product will inform you of any updates available, and allow you to automatically download them and apply them. Unfortunately, it might even ask you this while a backup is in progress, in which case the product could attempt to update itself on the spot. As you might expect, this can lead to unpredictable results. I tried it, and after the product restarted, it showed the backup that had been in progress with a message that it "has completed successfully." Opening the log, however, showed that the last recorded action was "locking the disk," and there was no indication that the backup really completed.
The product takes steps to assure that scheduled backups are not missed, and that data integrity exists. Unfortunately, the implementation might do more harm than good. The product runs validations as a background task that does not show up on the product's user interface. If one is running, it will not stop if you try to reboot your computer. So if you expect your computer to come back up quickly, you may be in for a surprise. When you expect to see the "logging off" message, you might see a message on that Windows screen that says "Operations in progress. Please wait." It looks like a standard OS message, and you can't even tell that it's related to Acronis. Some users have reported being stuck in that situation for many hours or possibly overnight. In some cases, you might have been comfortable delaying your reboot until the validation finished, but instead find your computer crippled. Ironically, this might cause you to press the reset button, causing anything from a "check disk" to having your RAID array spending the next day validating itself or rebuilding itself. Using a backup to recover from this might be a needed option.
Another frightening feature is that when you reboot, the product may take the default action of starting a missed scheduled backup. In most cases that may be fine, but that's not the case right after a restore. If you restored your system on a trial basis using the third most recent incremental backup, you don't want the system backing things up from your new current state and messing up your backup chain. It will act as if you had not backed up in three days with no forward references. Likewise, if you are recovering to a crippled system, such as a partially failed RAID array, the performance hit at startup time might be more than you can afford. Potentially destroying the integrity of your backup chain is a good reason to disable this automatic feature, but you will need to be on guard for missed backups. An overly full backup disk might leave you weeks or months behind in any event.
This product offers many more significant features and many are well implemented an powerful. But you also might find yourself at a loss to understand why you can't back up, or even worse, can't restore. You may get confusing prompts about providing credentials even when you already have automatic access to a disk that's part of your home group. (Windows 7) You might find that the product won't restore to a particular disk and there's no clear explanation. You might have problems restoring from a backup that passed validation, yet be able to restore from the previous day's backup in stand alone mode, even when it refused to work from within Windows. You might sometimes see your network drives, and other times not see them. This is especially disconcerting when you are trying to restore from a network drive while booting from the product's disk. At other times, you might not have that problem even though nothing about your computer or network is different.
In a nutshell, if you can trust the backups, you will have a great product. I can sometimes restore a typical Windows 7 Professional system (OS disk only, assuming libraries with personal data are not on the OS disk) in as little as seven minutes. As a point of reference, I am using relatively fast computers. Problems that left other people's computers unusable for an entire day might have impacted me for less than 15 minutes. Yet the user interface still left me hung up for minutes at a time out of the box.
Is it worth buying? I will continue to use this product, but I'll be very careful about it. I won't buy upgrade copies for my other computers. Would I recommend it to others? That depends. If you are willing to live with its problems, what will it cost you? This product comes with a single user license. How many computers can a single user use it on? The box says Acronis Backup Online, which is a supported feature, allows your account to back up up to five computers. But once you read the license agreement, you find that you are limited to having it installed on one computer at a time. If you want to restore a disk's individual files over the network by using a different computer, so you are not tying up CPU cycles on the computer being restored, you can't do it without a complete uninstall on the first computer. There's also a Plus Pack add on,which I would not seem to need according to the table on the back of the box. If you have a GPT disk, you'll find it won't work at all without paying extra for the add on. With 2TB drives becoming common, and with RAID capable computers, many ordinary computers will not be able to use this product.
Many software products are licensed for a reasonable number of computers given normal use by a consumer. For example, my Microsoft Office license allows me to install the software on one additional personal device, such as a laptop. My family of five has a media center computer in the den, and with desktops, laptops, notebooks and tablets, we'd need nine licenses for an MSRP of $450. For the same price, I could buy over 6 Terabytes of network storage, which will include its own backup software. That seems like a better deal. If you anticipate doing regular backups with the hope that you will never need to do a restore, spending the money on network drives might make the most sense. You could even use Windows 7 backup and let it run at night.
Description of True Image Home 2011 PC Backup and Recovery [Old Version]Acronis, INC. TI-14-DV-RT-W-EN true image home 2011
Have you ever accidentally deleted a file, had a virus corrupt your files, or had a disk fail? These are just a few examples of how people lose pictures, music, personal and financial data every day. Don't let this happen to you. Now is the time to protect your PC with Acronis True Image Home 2011.  Redesign of friendly user interface includes new features like Drag and Drop for faster navigation. View larger. Acronis True Image Home 2011 Based on Acronis' patented disk imaging and bare metal restore technologies, Acronis True Image Home 2011 provides home users with reliable, backup and disaster recovery of systems, applications, settings and personal files. From an intuitive graphical interface, you can easily define where, locally or online, and how often to backup a PC. Create copies of your hard drive with just a few quick steps while continuing to work. If you lose an important file, don't worry: you can go back in time to recover it easily.  Core Features and Benefits Chart. View Larger Acronis' legendary user-friendly and intuitive Graphical User Interface has long been a favorite of customers and reviewers. Acronis True Image Home 2011's all-new version is even better, designed to scale to the needs of novices and advanced users alike. Optimizations for Windows 7 make navigation faster. Plus, it integrates seamlessly into your control panel so you can backup Windows libraries with little effort. Try Acronis Nonstop Backup, designed to deliver continuous system and data protection, so you never lose valuable data. Spend more time working and less time worrying with Set&Forget scheduling: configure and automate system backups and data protection. Use Try&Decide to create a confined environment where you can safely try new software and browse the Web. After testing, you can decide whether to keep or discard changes to your system. You'll find that Acronis True Image Home 2011 is a unique and complete way to protect your PC, offering a full set of advanced features in an affordable and easy-to-use solution. Try it today! Advanced Features  Try & Decide: create a confined environment where you can safely try new software and browse the Web. View Larger |  NonStop Backup: Automatically creates incremental backups allowing you to roll back your system, files and folders to any point in time. View larger. |  Disk Imaging: Backup the entire system and recover your operating system and applications without reinstalling any software. View larger. | Highlights & Benefits  View Larger |  View Larger | | New Time Explorer: An easy way to view and manage your backup files from a single screen. | - New! Windows 7 Integration Discover how well Acronis True Image Home 2011 and Windows 7 work together to better protect your PC. Improvements include integration in the Backup and Restore section of the Control Panel; ability to view and restore previous file or volume versions from the Context menu; backup and restore of Windows libraries; and the ability to launch Acronis True Image Home 2011 backups from the Windows 7 Taskbar.
- New! Graphical User Interface A redesign of our friendly user interface includes new features like Drag and Drop for faster navigation. Wizards and One-Click configuration tools select the best backup and restore options for your needs.
- Improved! Acronis Nonstop Backup Automatically creates incremental backups every five minutes: roll back your system, files, and folders to any point in time.
- Improved! Time Explorer You'll find this only with Acronis: an easy way to view and manage your backup files from a single screen. Annotate backup comments and review screenshots that show the state of the desktop at the moment of the backup. And much more...
Core Details
Backup Software
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![True Image Home 2011 PC Backup and Recovery [Old Version]](/images/True-Image-Home-2011-PC-Backup-and-Recovery-Old-Version-B003VIVY7G-L.jpg)
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