Durham PC Users Group November, 2005
Newest Acronis True Image 9.0 Adds File Backup, Beats GhostFall is the major season for new software versions. On September 20, Acronis released version 9.0 of Acronis True Image, their top-ranked disk imaging backup utility. It's now better looking, faster and now backs up files and folders as easily as it does partitions and disks! Symantec's Ghost 10 came out earlier, September 13, but showed me (see below) it is bulky and slow. So much for the image-maker war. As readers know, I like Acronis True Image — use and recommend it as part of a regular and reliable backup procedure. It creates an image of your system so you can restore your PC — get it back working, in minutes. Adding the ability to back up folders and files is a big step forward. Acronis True Image 9.0 does its new stuff on specific folders such as My Documents or files such as your latest music download. The operation is straightforward. A wizard walks you through the steps. Acronis True Image's revamping includes a new, intuitive interface — new titles, new pages and new artwork. As you can see below, the main Acronis Acronis True Image 9.0 art features two arrows in two colours circling a PC. In version 8.0, there was only one arrow on that logo — a red one.
Acronis True Image 9.0 has 2 arrows, while Acronis True Image 8.0 had but oneVersion 8.0 did have a green arrow deeper in the software, signifying restore — and a single red arrow icon for create. In version 9.0, those specific icons now are labelled backup and recovery. But, as before, they carry only one arrow — to fit the same "actual" meaning. Getting to the nitty — If you are upgrading from a previous version, you no longer need to uninstall the old software. And Acronis True Image 9 will restore all images created by any previous version. When you have made the rescue CD and try it out you'll see a change. Once started, you now are presented with a new GUI and three iconic choices — to open a full version of Acronis True Image 9.0 (recommended), a safe version, or to restart Windows. In fact, if you wait 15 seconds, it will do the restart itself, booting into XP. The full version (using Linux), can access all hardware devices. The safe version uses a DOS environment and doesn't give you access to USB, PCMCIA, SCSI, RAID devices and the network. Acronis advises using the safe version only if full won't work. Note: These choices are only presented if you use the rescue CD. If you are restoring your OS partition through Windows and click inside Acronis True Image to reboot, the loader sends you directly to the backup/recover screen. I spotted another welcome change. After you clicked on the backup action, the next screen carried the cryptic Commit Pending. It now has the easily understood Operation Progress.
Everything's Slightly FasterAcronis True Image 9.0 is slightly faster than version 8.0, which really outstripped the opposition in my real life testing. My OS, now taking up 3,561 MB of C drive space, was compressed to an image file of only 1,167 MB via the default setting (normal) using Acronis True Image 9.0. That's less than a third of the size — it fits easily on two normal blank CDs. You can use a manual setting to compress it even further (High or Maximum), or you can go with no compression. Acronis True Image does not back up swap files, pagefile.sys or the hiberfil.sys. (They are auto-recreated when you restore the image). This reduces image size and speeds creation and restoration. Going with default (normal) settings and creating the image to a second drive storage partition took Acronis True Image 9.0 only 43 seconds. It verified the image in 56 seconds. Using Acronis True Image 8.0, it took 50 seconds to create (7 seconds longer) and verified in 1 minute, 1 second to complete (5 seconds longer). The restore function (now called recovery) from that partition, took virtually the same time, using either Acronis True Image 9.0 or Acronis True Image 8.0: 1 minute, 16 seconds When the image was burned to a CD using the same compression levels, it took a little over 10 minutes using Acronis True Image 9.0, very close to Acronis True Image 8.0.
More AdditivesAmong other new Acronis True Image 9.0 features is Managing System Restore. It is a wizard for disabling/enabling XP's System Restore on all drives or on specific drives. Many have opted out of Windows' restore utility, as I have, and save about 12 MB of space. Instead we use a more secure plan employing some type of disk imaging. Microsoft evidently foresaw that this might occur and provides its own way to disable/enable System Restore in XP's Control Panel under the System icon. Acronis, seeing the redundancy when using Acronis True Image, felt it opportune to assist users in joining the opt-out faction, providing a wizard to make it even easier... By comparison, Acronis True Image 9.0 took just 56 seconds to boot into the Linux environment from inside Windows and then only 1:17 to restore the image. Total time Acronis True Image 9.0 — 2:13, Ghost 10 — 5:12.
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