Back Up Your Troubles

Product Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Every time a particularly destructive Internet worm or virus hits, you can count on being reminded that all that data you lost should have been backed up. But what exactly is backing up? Is it just saving your data files?

The best way to back up a system is to create an exact image of the system so that, should you be hit with disaster, you can restore your system — including all files, configurations, preferences, updates, patches and the like — to exactly the way it was when your system worked.

Sounds simple enough, but making disk images isn't always so simple. As of this writing, both Norton Ghost and PowerQuest Drive Image require you to boot to DOS to make a disk image, so none of your Windows apps are usable during the process.

And it can be a long process. If you have one of today's heftier drives, you're looking at roughly one hour of backup time for every 30 gigs or so. That's a long time to be down for an individual, and plain murder for a business.

Acronis True Image 6.0 allows users to work on their Windows systems while the image is being made. And because the program works in Windows, not DOS, it can save the image to CD-Rs, external FireWire or USB 2.0 devices, or network drives. You can even burn an image and copy it onto DVD-R discs, which is a great feature. With today's larger drives, backing up to CD-Rs is frustratingly getting reminiscent of the old days when we used to have to back up to floppies.

Supported partitions: FAT 16/32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, and Linux Swap. Also, special sector-by-sector support for other partitions and corrupted file systems is available.

Acronis True Image is easy to use, with a Windows XP-like interface. What else? Well, at $44.95, it's up to 40 percent cheaper than the other guys.