Product Reviews

If you've ever had to reinstall windows from scratch after a hard disk failure, you'll know how tedious it can be. After several cups of tea and quite a bit of finger tapping, you'll still have to install all the drivers for your hardware, all your software and then copy over all those important files and documents you backed up. Hang on, you did back up everything before reinstalling didn't you?

There is an easier way, though. Acronis TrueImage lets you take an exact copy, or 'image', of your hard drive. This means that when it comes to reinstalling Windows, you can just restore the image and you'll have a lovely fresh copy of Windows with

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all the drivers and software already installed.

True Image does more than just drive imaging, though - it also helps you backup all of your important data. The program is capable of backing up particular files, folders or emails, and it can even search for and back up specific file types scattered across your hard disk. While this sounds great in theory, it's not without limitations. Backing up your emails may seem like a wonderful idea, but True Image can only do so with Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express - if you're using another client, you'll just have to stick to doing it manually. Despite this oversight, the backup functions of True Image are still excellent. It's capable of both incremental and differential backups, which save time and disk space by only backing up files that have changed since the last backup. A handy addition is that True Image allows you to mount these backups in My Computer just like an external hard drive. This makes locating particular files and folders vastly easier than before.

Acronis' True Image 10 is powerful and easy to use. The backup functions are a great addition to an already excellent piece of software, and at this price its competitors are going to have their work cut out.