by Alan German

Another year. Another version of Acronis True Image Home. So, what does the 2011 edition of this perennial disk imaging software have to offer?

The first obvious item is a new user interface. Now, there may well be some who are huge fans of the new look and feel (the program development team for instance); however, I regret that I am not a member of this particular fan club. There doesn't appear to be any major new functionality, but there is a fairly steep learning curve as to where all the functions are now located.

For example, let's take a look at the bread-and-butter backup and recover options. The disk backup wizard is gone. Instead, there is a screen showing all the available disks and a whole host of optional entries. You need to check off the partitions that are to be included in the backup, and then make sure that the options are set correctly for your preferences.

In my case, the program defaults to G:\My backups as a storage location for the disk images. I don't mind using the G: drive, which is an external USB disk, but I certainly don't want to use the default “My backups” directory since I have already set up a directory tree to maintain some degree of order for backups of various hard disks and their associated partitions. So, this is one item that needs to be reset.

Similarly, the default backup scheme enabled is “Version chain”. This too is not a preferred option for me since it creates full and differential backups, and deletes versions older than six months. My normal mode of operation is to use the “Single version scheme” to create a brand new, full backup every time I run the software, and keep the resulting images until I decide that they are no longer required.

Now all of the items along these lines are simple changes and the specific preferences, once set, can be retained for future use, so it's really just a question of getting used to how the program now operates.

But, some other odd features show up when you run the program a few days after making one or more backups. The main screen shows some details of the last few images that were created. However, in big letters, it indicates that the disk is “not backed up yet”. Of course, this isn't true. The backup was indeed made some time ago. And, to be fair, there is a message in a smaller font indicating that the backup was completed. So, I guess what it's trying to say is that a new image can be created right now, using the previously-specified imaging options.

Originally published: April, 2011

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