Review of Acronis Backup and Recovery 10

At some point, PCs are destined to fail.  It could be because of OS malfunction, a virus, faulty hard drives; whatever the reason, it's very likely that at some point your computer will crash.  This happened to my old Dell just a couple weeks ago, and unfortunately, I was not prepared.

As soon as I purchased a new PC, my first step was to find a program that would save my computer in the instance of another crash. There is a technology known as disk imaging created exactly for this purpose.

Disk imaging programs essentially copy your OS, system settings, installed programs, basic computer setup, etc., and put it onto a separate disk/CD/DVD etc.  One such program that does this is Acronis Backup and Recovery.  Acronis is known for their PC backup/recovery software, as well as other tools for backing up and saving system settings.

The installation for Acronis is very short, taking about 3-5 minutes depending on your OS.  I tested this product with Vista 32-bit.  It's worth it to note that for some reason, the product doesn't fully install on Windows Vista Home Premium.

For around 100 GB of data, it takes 30 minutes to an hour for Acronis to complete a full system backup.  This was after a fresh install of Windows.  It's also possible to program the software to do regular system backups at a scheduled date, much like a virus scan.

Testing the actual restore was a slightly different matter.  I had some initial difficulty getting the restore to load.  I tested it on two different machines (one laptop and one desktop, both with Intel Pentium 4 processors).  While my laptop had no problem running the virtual OS from Acronis, my desktop did encounter some error messages about volume mapping.  Bypassing those and consulting the help guide got me through successfully, though.  So all in all, about 2 hours to get the full restored setup running.

Bottom line for Acronis Backup and Recovery 10:

If, like me, you struggle with boot disc programs (even though many of those are free), Acronis is a great resort for a full system backup.  Unlike Norton Ghost and a couple other PC backup tools I tried out, this one worked almost flawlessly and was undeniably the fastest in terms of installation and final load of the restored system.

All-in-all, a very decent system recovery tool.