by Craig Buck

Created on: July 24, 2009   Last Updated: March 25, 2010

-Background

Working in IT, I am always stressing to other users how important it is to back up work.  The built in Home Premium backup in XP and Vista is fine for backing up pictures and documents but will be no use whatsoever in a complete system failure. This is where Acronis True Image Home comes in. It is a comprehensive backup and restore solution which we will explore in more detail a little later on.

-Installation

True Image Home is very easy to install. Simply place the CD in your cd player and follow the wizard. During installation, the software will check for version updates and download these if necessary. If an update is found then you will be asked if you wish to create a new startup disk which will allow you to restore your system without having to install a fresh version of the operating system first. This would save you about an hours time if you were unlucky enough to have to rebuild your system from scratch.
On completion of a successful installation, you will be asked to create a backup job which will be scheduled to run at a convenient time for you. More on this in a moment.

-Functions

True Image has many functions. We will take these one at a time.

Backup

This is the most obvious function. Here you can choose whether you want to back up certain files (such as the My Documents area), your email (assuming you use a client such as Outlook or Outlook express) or the full system including the registry. The last option is the most complete as it backs up everything and would be invaluable, should you experience a full system crash. For each one of these backup methods you can choose whichever backup type best suits your needs. The choices available are :-

Full the entire contents are backed up each time. (takes about 90 mins for 300gb)

Differential A full backup is taken the first time and then subsequent backups just back up changes from this initial backup (takes about 30 mins to backup changes)

Incremental A full backup is taken the first time and then subsequent backups are taken of changes that have happened since the previous backup (takes about 20 mins to backup a weeks changes).

My preferred option is the incremental strategy which is the shortest to run and also gives you the most flexibility. I run a 6 week incremental backup which means that every six weeks, a new full backup is taken. The only downside to this strategy is that if you do need to restore your entire system then you have to restore the full backup, followed by the

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