. ProsCombines backup, disk-cloning, rescue-disk creation, and more system utilities. Clean interface.

1. Acronis True Image Disk Director Boot Cd

Excellent mobile backup app. Lots of extra disk tools.

ConsCloud options still in the software even if you didn't buy the cloud service. Runs lots of backup processes. Doesn't restore directly to Facebook. Bottom LineAcronis True Image 2017 brings some unique capabilities to backup software, including Facebook and mobile backup. Its interface is the friendliest in the game, yet it still lets experts dig into very detailed backup options. Acronis offers the friendliest and most feature-packed for home users. Its True Image Cloud service and the True Image software reviewed here can both create full disk-image copies for the ultimate in disaster protection.

The only difference is that the Cloud version offers online storage as a target for saving your backup. The software also offers a cornucopia of backup options, including not only entire disk images but also file and folder backup. New for the 2017 version are mobile backup to PC, Facebook backup, and remote backup management. Somehow, the program remembered my account even with a fresh reinstall on the same PC. After you install Acronis, quite a few processes will always be running on your system, even for features you're not using.

Paragon Backup & Recovery is not as persistent as this, only running processes as you use the software.InterfaceTrue Image's interface is simple, modern, and friendly. A left panel is populated by flat, line-drawing icons reminiscent of those in Windows 10's new Settings app, and in fact the interface works well with touch-screen PCs. It's a far cry from 's many-tabbed, outdated user interface.

For this year's version of True Image, the company has moved the menu items around a bit. The first icon on True Image's home screen still shows your basic backup source set and destination. And the second still takes you to the archiving function, designed to free up your storage from old, unused data.

Syncing, Tools, and Mobile backup come next. More about these later.The Tools icon takes you to Disk Cloning, Rescue-Media Creation, and more. Under this, the More Tools option opens a File Explorer folder of nine additional tools, including a System Report, DriveCleanser, and Try&Decide—a utility for temporarily installing software you're unsure about. What to Back Up and WhenBy default, Acronis selects Entire PC as the source of your backup. You can change this to specified drives, partitions, files, or folders. If you choose files or folders, you see a folder tree with check boxes for selecting what you want backed up. An estimate of the space required by your selected backup helpfully appears at the bottom of the screen.

Once you've chosen your source and destination, a green button lets you back up right then or delay backup for up to 6 hours. You can also just choose to initiate the backup at your leisure, by choosing Later.To schedule regular backups, you tap the Options button, which offers daily, monthly, and weekly choices, along with some more interesting options.

For example, you can tell the program to run the backup whenever you log on or off your PC, or at startup or shutdown. For the ultimate in protection, you can tell it to back up whenever a file in the backup set is changed.More detailed options appear in more tabs of the Options page. You can specify a backup scheme such as Single Version, Version chain, Incremental, Differential, or even a Custom scheme. An example of the last could be 'Create a full version after every 6 incremental versions.' Incremental backups are a way of not reinventing the wheel, file-wise—they only save the changes made since the previous incremental backup.

Differential saves just the changes made since the last full backup.Acronis also gives you plenty of notification options: You can have one emailed to you for any backup action, including completion of a backup session or when insufficient disk space is detected. This tops, which is decidedly lacking in notification options.On the Exclusions tab, you can add any specific filenames or wildcard character strings, such as.exe, to exclude them from the backup.

Lest you thought the options already mentioned were not detailed or technical enough, the Advanced tab really lets you dig in, offering pre and post commands, splits for multiple backup targets, validation, comments, custom error handling, file-level security, and other things those who just want to protect their photos and word docs won't care about. Those options may sound confusing and obscure, but users who just want an easy backup fix need never delve into this arcana. One section of the Advanced page, however, could be of use to a broader audience: Performance. Here you can tell the program how much of your system resources you want to let it to command.

By default, the priority is ranked Low, but you may want to raise the priority if you have a big job you want to finish fast. Another useful option in Advanced tells the program to shut down the PC when it's done backing up. I did find it odd that the Compression option was disabled, stuck at Normal.

Paragon Backup & Recovery let me adjust its equivalent setting.During backup, the program window shows progress with a line across the bottom, and it also calculates and displays the time it will take. In my testing, backups were always finished in a reasonable amount of time.Backup PerformanceA full backup of my test hard drive, which contained 14.1GB of data and programs, took 6 minutes and 6 seconds, a bit behind Paragon Backup & Restore's 5:03.

During the backup creation, Acronis's display of just minutes remaining was steadier and more believable than Paragon's wildly fluctuating estimates. Note that, since only Acronis and Paragon have updated their backup software since my last roundup of backup testing, they're the only contestants to have participated in this newer performance test. In previous full-system backup speed testing, Acronis was fastest. On the earlier test, Acronis True Image took 7 minutes, compared with Paragon's 12:57, ShadowProtect's 25:48, and NTI's ridiculous 2 hours and 4 minutes.Archive Old and Large FilesThe tool for archiving and analyzing large files, which I haven't seen in other backup software, gets its own button on the main interface menu. Sweet midi player 32 serial.

It analyzes your files for staleness and lets you push them off to either online or local storage. It also offers 256-bit AES encryption of the archived data as an option. The tool selects Acronis's home folder at first, but I found it more expedient to switch to my own frequently used folders. After the analysis, you can either select individual files to archive or all of them. Choose a storage destination, and tap the Archive button, which also shows how many megabytes you'll be sequestering. Even though the files will no longer exist on your local drive, they're still accessible from Acronis's entry in File Explorer.Disk Imaging and CloningWhen you choose to copy the entire drive, you get the option of encrypting the backup, which merely requires entering a password.

You can also specify intervals for incremental backups and sector-by-sector backup, which copies the entire drive, even parts that contain no data. Unlike, Acronis lets you specify compression level and operation priority. You can decide whether you care more about a quick backup or the ability to do other things on the PC during the backup. The Clone Disk Wizard is useful for those who want to reproduce an entire system (including the operating system) on a new PC.

It offers automatic and manual methods, the former of which copies all partitions and makes the new drive bootable. It can even resize partitions to fit the new disk capacity. Completing the process involves choosing the source and destination drives, and deciding whether to keep the same partition sizes or proportionally allot space, or to manually choose sizes for the partitions.Restoring Your DataOnce a backup is complete, new buttons appear at the bottom of its entry in the program window: Recover PC (if you backed up the entire drive) and Recover Files. Even if you back up your entire disk image, you don't have to restore the whole thing. You can just grab one or more folders or files by checking the check box next to their entries in a folder tree of the drive contents.

By default, files are recovered to their original locations, but a Browse link at the top of the Recovery page lets you change the destination folder.To perform a complete restoration, you simply tap the Recover PC button. You can then choose a date if you've made more than one backup. If you have more than one drive, you can choose which you want to restore, and even select just individual partitions within them. My full restore was a success, though Windows informed me that some drivers had to be updated.

After doing that, however, everything worked correctly.Mobile BackupAcronis now lets you wirelessly back up your smartphone to your PC via an app. To make getting that app easier, you simply point your phone at a QR code on the Mobile Device Backup page. The well-redesigned app makes it super easy to back up your contacts, photos, videos, calendars, and reminders to your PC over Wi-Fi.

If you have a lot of photos on your phone, as I do on my iPhone 6s, keep in mind that the backup could take a good while. One thing I find a little strange is that Continuous Backup, denoted as 'Experimental,' is enabled by default.

I usually use iTunes to back up my iPhone to a PC, but some will prefer and all-in-one backup solution, and this feature lets Android users benefit from local rather than cloud backup. Facebook BackupTo back up your precious social networking memories, you also head to the Mobile tab in Acronis True Image. But rather than signing in from within the application, you're taken to the website for your Acronis account. Once there, you need to figure out that you must Add a Resource in order to get to the Facebook backup option. Personally, I'm not terribly worried about Facebook losing my photos and memories, but it is possible for users to get hacked or have someone unauthorized go in and delete your content.

Acronis True Image Disk Director Boot Cd

After my account was backed up, an entry on the Web interface showed Back Up Now and Recover buttons. Hitting the latter took me to a page where I could see my Profile, Timeline, Albums, and so on. It doesn't recover your media to your Facebook account, but at least you have those photos and the rest in case someone hacks into your account and deletes everything.Other ToolsAcronis System Report generates—you guessed it—a report, after scanning the system for about a minute. Unhelpfully, the report is in a ZIP file in the program folder, and not displayed automatically for you on completion. But that's not such a bad thing, since it's indecipherable to all but the most technical mortals; it includes lots of text-based application, networking, and Registry data.The Add New Disk Wizard lets you choose and initialization method (GPT or MBR) and create partitions, but it's not really essential with, which includes tools like this.The Rescue Media Builder utility could be a lifesaver for anyone whose system won't start up, and creating the media was a snap on my test system. It creates an ISO file or formats a disc or USB drive for the rescue media.

The beauty of having startup media like this is that it contains the Acronis software, so you can rebuild your PC from a saved backup without needing to hunt down the software first. One of the cooler tools is Universal Restore, which lets you recreate one system to another with different hardware characteristics. Paragon offers a similar capability, but using any of these tools can be dicey.Acronis's ingenious Try&Decide option your hard drive so you can install software or make other changes without permanently writing the changes unless you decide to do so. I'm not sure I would recommend trusting your drive to something as intrusive as this, but it worked perfectly in my test. Other tools are even more intrusive, including one that creates a proprietary Secure Zone on your drive for preserving recovery data.The True Backup Solution?Acronis True Image is the easiest program in its class for non-technical folk, but it still includes detailed and powerful options for experts.

Its combination of backup (both local and cloud), disk cloning, rescue-disc creation, and other unique tools, along with a more modern interface than the competition, secures Acronis True Image's place as PCMag's Editors' Choice for local backup software.

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Pros:It installed without any problems and was not difficult to use.Cons:Could not sucessfully back up a disk image to a 2.5 inch external hard drive (USB) and could not sucessfully restore an image from an external 2.5 inch (USB) drive. Tried multiple times and all failed with and Acronis error code at random points in the backup/restore.Overall Review:Backing up to a 2.5 inch USB connected drive should be considered basic functionality. Acronis 11 failed on two different drives and with two different brands of enclosures. Ultimately, I backed up the disk image to the internal drive. I was able to use Windows XP Explorer to copy the archive to the external drive without error. However, Acronis would fail part way through multiple restore attempts, indicating a media error.

I finally downloaded a freeware Drive Image product and the backup and restore to the external drive worked perfectly the first time! There was NO media error. Tech forums indicate this product declines more with each new release. Make sure you do a test restore of a backup or you may be in for a major disappointment when it is time for the real thing.

Pros:Can restore files within Windows, schedule backups to network locations, and even start clones of drives within Windows (usually shuts down and reboots for the clone itself though)Cons:Won't run on Windows Server 2003, won't always recognize attached USB drives correctly and hangs the program, and the wizards in the software are still difficult to understand sometimes (not exactly sure what every option means vs its alternative).Overall Review:Used to using Ghost, so it had big shoes to fill. Norton wants like $70 for a new version though, so this won out and will work fine for now. Pros:True Image installed and worked as expected. I was able to create an image of my system partition and restore it successfully on another drive.Cons:The included Disk Director appears to have installed correctly and reported that it did on both XP & Vista, but when you fire it up a screen comes up briefly saying it is scanning the system and then it closes. The main function I wanted was the Partitioning manager, but can't get anything to come up. Calling tech support is like calling a stone.Overall Review:Buy this if all you really want is the True Image software, because the Disk Director appears to be broken. Pros:NONE - neither of these programs would load and run on my PC running XPCons:Every time I tried to load either the True Image or Disk Director programs my PC would lock up and I would have to use Task Manager to shut the installation down.

I would be left with a corrupt installation that would not uninstall. It also removed all of the restore points on my PC so that I could not use system restore to remove this junk. I tried the Acronis tech support chat service but that was the usual round of 4 hours of wasted, try-this try-that scripts that got nothing done.

Save your money and but something safe.Overall Review:You open software that won't work and your stuck with it, it's your problem. Pros:It Worked! (see other thoughts)Cons:When run from the CD, the GUI is very simple, which is good and bad. It doesn't convey the power and flexibility of this utility unless you can do your mantra and become one with the computer chip, or, your a total geek and can see multiple dimensions constructed in binary.I have a buddy who grew up on super computers, really, and part of his job was networking these mainframes.

Told me this utility evolved from folks who wrote software for mainframes and subsequent networks, so how it's constructed and words it uses in it's GUI aren't intuitive to someone who suckled and teethed on desktops. Thus my confusion.Overall Review:The interface is not laid out plain with, everything explained so that it could be run by a toaster oven. It did not do what I needed, the first two attempts, but, once I figured out the GUI and laid out what I wanted, it worked!Relatively new laptop that came with two hidden partitions for reconstructing rescue disks and a C: partition with the, lovely, wonderful, Windows, Vista.New owner, Me, modified the hard drive with two additional partitions, one with Windows XP to dual-boot to, and one data partition.Then, 'THE TASK.' Replace this hard drive with the biggest notebook drive made, transfer these 5 partitions to the new drive with all the OS, programs and data intact, partitions resized to MY liking, and have everything work flawlessly afterwards.

Not much to ask. Nice thing is, if what you ask won't work, it doesn't happen, with no harm done. Also with no explanation as to why.