the Skateboard

Computing today requires several security defenses. We all know about the dangers of viruses and hackers, so hopefully everyone has a good anti-virus program as well as a firewall installed in their computers. A third line of defense is a good drive image program. This will enable you to make a backup copy of your drive and restore it if something should happen to your system. And believe me, as hard as we try to make sure things don’t go wrong, they inevitably will!

Acronis True Image 8.0 is a user-friendly program that enables users to quickly and easily make an image of their drive or drives, and safely store it on another partition, an internal or external drive, or even a writable CD or DVD.

An image is like a photograph. It contains all the information on your drive, including the operating system, settings, programs and files. When you restore an image, everything on your drive will revert to the exact way it was when the image was created.

Okay, so how hard is it to use? First you open the program, select “create image” then click on “start now.” The software will ask what you want to image. Then it will ask you where you want to store your image. After you select your destination, there are a few other options (like how compressed you want your files) then there is nothing left to do but get a cup of coffee and let it do its thing. It doesn’t take long to image a drive. Acronis True Image is fast. The program guides you through everything. This is by far the most user-friendly program I’ve ever seen.

Without getting into the real technical aspects of this incredible software, let’s just look at what it can do besides simply creating an image – and I do mean “simply.” Acronis True Image has the ability to verify your image is not corrupted. This is important because if you need to restore an image, you definitely want to make sure it is a good working image. After your image is created, select “check image” to verify it is ready to be used if you need it. This also just takes a couple minutes.

Some users might wonder if they really need to make a backup image. Let me tell you from experience, it is a great safety net and allows users to “play around” with their computers all the while knowing if something goes wrong, then in a matter of a few minutes they can safely restore their system (settings, files, programs, etc.) to good working order. And if you only want to restore a corrupted file, Acronis True Image has that capability.

Acronis True Image can create a bootable rescue disk which I highly recommend. This will enable you to boot up your computer if something drastic happens that corrupts your operating system making your computer unbootable.

Also, to make things even easier, you can “clone” your hard drive. Perhaps you want to copy everything to another drive for use in another computer. If you have an external hard drive just plug it into your computer and select “Disk Clone” and your cloned drive can be put on your external hard drive. Plus, if you want to add a cloned drive to your system, this software will do it for you.

So, what if you’ve already created a working image of your drive and you’ve altered a few things on your system? This software allows you to make incremental backups and schedule backups as well, re-imaging only the files that have changed. Also, it allows for scheduled full imaging. As a believer in backup imaging, I highly recommend making a full image once a month. It has saved me more times than I can count - not to mention the peace of mind knowing if something happens I can be up a running in only a few minutes. Forget about reformatting and reinstalling all your programs. Just restore an image and your back up with a working computer.

This program can also destroy data on a disk drive, if you want to make sure all your information is gone. This is a handy little tool.

Acronis True Image works in your Windows program so you do not need to boot into DOS to use it. It also doesn’t require a reboot after use, which is something required by most other imaging software. You can create your image and use your system at the same time.

In short, Acronis True Image is the easiest way to get peace of mind. It’s user-friendly, fast, and does more than simply create an image. It’s much more than a backup and recovery program, although that is probably the most important part for home computer users. And, the software guides you through everything so there is no learning curve. Anyone can use it! You don’t need to be a computer geek to understand it. With a price of $49.99, it’s quite a bargain.

For more information or to purchase Acronis True Image 8.0, go to their website.

© 2004 Francine Brokaw

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