Review: Acronis True Image Home 9 utility software

Backing up your PC might seem like a chore, but the more we trust our computers with our digital photos, music and important documents, the more vital it is that we don’t let something like a hard disk failure take all those valuable files away from us.

One of the best kinds of backup protection you can use is something called disk imaging software, which takes a snapshot of your entire hard disk and allows you to quickly restore everything to full working order should things ever go awry.

Acronis True Image Home 9 is one such utility and could well be the best of its type.

True Image backs up not only your documents, photos and music, but also all the applications you have installed and even your computer’s operating system. It allows users to make hard disk backups in one go as well as specific files or folders, or just files that have been changed since the previous backup.

It can save its resulting backup files either to a hard drive or to removable media, such as CDs or DVDs. It’s common these days for many hard drives to exceed the 80Gb mark, but True Image uses compression to make your backups smaller and neater.

It squashed our test computer’s backup file down to just over 4Gb, which was the perfect size to burn to DVD. Those with bigger backup files can span their backup over several discs.

The Acronis utility can also clone one disk to another – useful if you’re putting a new hard disk in your PC – and can password protect your backups for safe keeping.

Not only is True Image cheap compared with its main rivals, it also has one or two distinct advantages. Its recovery console, for example, offers many more options than some other similar programs and it can also restore certain files and folders without requiring a reboot.

Everything’s presented in a simple, graphical interface and wizards help to make the whole program easy to use. Put simply, True Image is an essential utility to have on your side.

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