Acronis is gaining a growing reputation in the field of disk imaging software. Acronis True Image 10 Home is the simplest of its product range, and the company also makes four other imaging products aimed at the corporate market.

The installation splash screen offers you three choices; install the product, access the user guide or access the technical support via the Acronis website. Installation is straightforward, requiring only the entry of a 25-character unlock code and a system reboot.

Although the user interface is fairly easy to follow, Acronis provides rather a surfeit of routes to achieve the same objective.

The main window has a toolbar with five tool icons. Access to these same tools is duplicated, not only in a vertical menu box along the left edge of the Acronis window, but access to three of these tools is also duplicated in the main area of the window. There is even a dropdown menu, accessed from a text menu along the very top of the Acronis window, which duplicates access to these tools all over again.

This gratuitous repetition is unnecessary, inefficient and just makes the user interface look much more complex and busy than it really needs to be. The main area of the window is split into three; Pick a task, Manage a task or Pick a tool. There are only two tasks shown; backup or recovery. Selecting backup opens the ‘Create backup’ wizard.

The opening step of the backup wizard provides a choice of imaging the entire disk, imaging a partition, or only backing up specific folders or files. This flexibility demonstrates the strength of the Acronis product, as some disk-imaging software is limited to only saving images of an entire disk, or only saving a partition. For example Runtime Software’s Drive Image XML only saves images of partitions.

The Acronis backup options allow even finer detail as, on step two of the wizard, it is possible to choose to back up classes of data based on file extension, or even on file type, such as all video or all audio files.

You can also choose to back up your application settings or your Microsoft Outlook messages, settings, accounts and address book. Acronis True Image 10 Home is the only product, out of the five reviewed here, to allow this level of detail.

The third step of the wizard varies according to your choice of data type to back up, but in all cases it allows specific data selection. On step four you specify a destination for your backup. Acronis True Image 10 Home is the only product in this group test that can create a true hidden partition on the source hard disk as a backup destination. Although this is certainly convenient, it is the least secure backup method because it is the most vulnerable to hardware failure.

Step five allows a choice of full, incremental or differential backup. In step six you can set backup options. In the final steps, you can add a text comment, and see a summary of the proposed backup as well as the ‘Proceed’ button.

As the above description of just the backup procedure shows, Acronis True Image Home is a powerful, feature-rich product. It’s the only product of the five reviewed to already include Microsoft Vista support and it uses Windows Explorer to browse its images to give you a familiar look and feel.

This article is part of a group test drive-imaging software.
See also:
Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8
R-Tools R-Drive Image 3.0
Runtime Software Drive Image XML
Symantec Norton Save & Restore

Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf download above.