Acronis True Image 6.0: A Powerful Data Backup & Cloning Tool

What is Acronis True Image? Let me quote right from their Web site:

"Acronis True Image 6.0 is your ultimate data insurance policy! It takes an exact image of your hard disk drive or separate partitions for complete backup, and allows you to restore all of their contents, including operating systems, programs, personal data and settings. In the event of fatal software or hardware failure Acronis True Image protects your data, even when ordinary file backup software does not work."

That's it in a nutshell. If you want to see a full features list, go check out their Web site. This is a Quick Look article, designed to give you a brief overview of the backup cloning tool and what I thought about it in practice. I've been using Acronis True Image for several months now, and it's an amazing disk clone tool that I wouldn't want to be without — but there were a few painful bumps and bruises along the way that you should be aware of (and hopefully avoid).

The Best Boot-Up CD I Own

The single most useful feature that Acronis True Image has for my needs is the bootable CD that allows me to image entire partitions or drives across my network. This might be old news to Norton Ghost users, but this was the first time I had ever experienced such bliss and I was thrilled with it. Every few months, I format my hard drive and start over with a clean install of Windows XP (I'm very hard on my OS and routinely fill it up with junk), and having something other than a blank slate to start over with is very helpful. This is where Acronis True Image comes in. I installed XP, patched it up, installed all my favourite applications, configured and tweaked everything to my liking, then took a snapshot image of the machine in that state. As part of the snapshot, you can choose how much compression to use, password protect it, and add a very verbose text description — this is an excellent place to list what builds of the software you've installed, etc.

When I want to return to that pristine state, I boot up using the Acronis True Image CD, pick the image from my network server, and in under an hour I'm back up and running. I can't overstate how useful and powerful this feature is. The CD boot disc is impressive — it has a full graphic user interface, mouse control (even with a drop shadow) and works exactly like the Windows application. From the boot disc, I was able to recognize my external Firewire DVD-R and burn CD-Rs through it. I'd love to see a native DVD burning driver though, to make things easier for those of us with DVD burners.

More Than Just a Pretty Boot CD

The boot disc is only part of the equation though — this application will allow you to back up Windows from within Windows. This is no small feat and something that many backup programs can't accomplish. You can even continue to use your computer while it's being backed up — I haven't tested this myself, but that's what their marketing department claims. And speaking of their marketing department, I'm sure this isn't something they want to see me write, but once you've created that boot CD, it's a powerful tool unto itself — even on computers that don't have Acronis True Image installed. I've used it on more than one occasion to make an image of another computer I've been working on just in case I mess something up. This makes it a good tool to have in your emergency toolkit.

Not Entirely Perfect...

There's room for improvement though. I happened to encounter a disk clone problem I'll tackle later. I'm a product manager at heart, as much as I really like Acronis True Image, it could use some enhancements. I should note that all of these comments are based on my use of their disk cloning tool over the past few months — there's a newer version that I haven't checked out yet that just might address them. Download the demo and see if it does.

One of the worst bugs I found is that when it runs into a problem during an imaging process, it gives you an error — then promptly quits the whole process and exits. It doesn't matter if you're 99% finished — it just stops. As you can imagine this can be quite frustrating! I was doing a backup over the network and halfway through the process received this error: "Failed to write data to the image archive file. A possible reason may be poor media quality." Poor media quality? Over a network? Unlikely. Possible reasons for this failure could be packet loss or insufficient drive space on the network drive. It is sometimes the case when cloning to a network drive. Regardless, the error message should be more descriptive, and it should have an option to retry or even restart using a different media source/location. Simply exiting isn't a graceful failure. It turned out that I didn't have enough drive space on the network drive I was pushing the image onto, but the software should check for the estimated space needed before it starts.

The process can also mysteriously end in the middle of a backup — I was burning a 1.8 gig partition image, and right after I put in disc three, it exited and rebooted without warning. I tried again, but there were some strange slow-downs during the process — during the burn of disc two the progress indicator paused for several minutes without explanation. I nearly cancelled the backup because I thought it had locked up, but it started up again just before I hit cancel. There are also unhelpful errors when backing up to a CD-R: if you enter an incorrect file name, it gives you an error message stating "Please enter another file name". It doesn't tell you how the file name is wrong or what structure it needs to have (here's a hint: you need to have the proper extension at the end of the file name).

No Data/Media Verification? Ouch!

Lastly, there seems to be no form of data and media verification. I spent 30 minutes backing up a partition, and the process completed successfully. I rebooted, then tried to restore that same partition. I put in disc one, and it sat there scanning the disc without any noticeable activity for several minutes. It then gave an error message and asked for disc two. I put in disc two, and it took over three minutes before this error message popped up:

"The drive is not ready. A possible reason may be poor media quality."

I'm finding this out NOW? Woe is the user who does a backup and thinks it's valid without first testing it!

When using the CD-R boot disc, I was unable to back up a partition to another partition on the same hard drive — the error reported was that the "drive is read-only". I confirmed that the partition I was trying to use is formatted and can be written to, but the software refused to write to the drive. This leads me to believe that you cannot create an image file on the same hard drive as your source — though it would be nice if the warning simply said that!

But the most frustrating problem of all is demonstrated by the photo below:

Those are all of the bad discs I burned trying to get it to work. What was the problem? I had a new 32x CD-R burner at the time (I now have a 48x) as it is very convenient to execute hard disk cloning to CD, but like many people I try to buy my CD-Rs in bulk. I had a big spindle of 100 discs certified for 24x burn speeds. Guess what? Acronis True Image burns at the fastest speed possible for the CD-R, and doesn't give you the option to slow it down. It took me weeks and all of those wasted CDs, and several email messages with Acronis tech support (which is excellent by the way), to figure out the problem. The solution here is to allow the user to specify the burn speed, just the way they can in any good CD burning application.

It's also important to remember that this tool has no scheduling feature — it's not designed to be an incremental file-based backup tool like Handy Backup. Acronis True Image works nicely in conjunction with Handy Backup — I use Handy Backup daily, and Acronis True Image weekly or monthly (depending if I remember — this is why scheduling is so critical for file backups!).

Bottom Line: A Must-Have Tool

Despite my seemingly long list of gripes above, I couldn't do without this tool. The CD-R burning speed was the most painful glitch when I executed disk cloning to CD, and as long as you have the right speed media to match your CD-R, you won't get bitten by that one (or just back up across a network). I tend to only back up across my network now, and thus the tool is faultless for me. If Acronis can polish up the issues I mentioned above, this application would be almost perfect.

The product can be purchased directly from Acronis for only $44.95 (and you can download a free demo - just be aware that you can't restore the data using it, only back it up) — I consider that to be a bargain considering the sheer power of this application. Acronis is also excellent about keeping the application up to date, which is highly commendable. It's one of my pet peeves that companies like PowerQuest seem to come out with a new version of Partition Magic every eight months and ask their customers to pay for minor improvements that should be free (like support for larger hard drives).

Acronis True Image is a permanent part of my toolkit, and it should be of yours too.