Acronis--A Nifty Company Does Software and Licensing Right

I have to say I'm really impressed with Acronis. I've used their products for a couple of years, ever since I started using their backup/disk upgrade software product called "EZ Gig II" version 6 to upgrade and backup a laptop. This was after suffering a painful recovery process using traditional backup methods.

I had been doing faithful backups on my laptop using XP's included "NT Backup" program, but my freshest backup was several days old. In addition, I had to face a bare metal restore on a new drive. This took nearly 3 full working days to complete (while XP downloaded patch after patch and rebooted countless times), while trying to get real work done, and I wasn't completely whole for 3 weeks. I decided that backing up just my data, when I remembered to, wasn't enough. I needed to be able to be operational again in hours, not days and weeks.

EZ Gig II gave me the ability to image a drive to another drive quickly and easily. Later, when the product changed names to Acronis True Image 8, I upgraded so that I could have better support for USB and RAID technologies.

I've sinced upgraded to 9 and have been pleased with each upgrade. With a quick download and a license key, my systems now have the ability to image to another drive, backup to a file, perform scheduled incremental backups, mount saved images as read-only drives, and support a huge array of hardware including RAID, USB 2.0, IDE, and SATA. I can copy to a drive, save an image (even while working on the system!), add to that image, save that image to a server (FTP or SMB), boot off a recovery CD, etc., etc...

I've grown to love this little program. I'm addicted to upgrading because everytime I've upgraded, Acronis has added some new functionality addressing some (possibly unspoken) need or desire. They also supply updates and patches to your current version, so you don't have to upgrade, if you just need a bug fix.

I just upgraded to 9.1 which, in my package, included a discounted copy of "Universal Restore". This gets me even closer to my dream of being able to save everything daily in minutes and recover within 2 hours, even to a totally different bare-metal system (be it laptop, desktop, or whatever).

The licensing on their products is common sense and reasonably priced. Buy one license per computer you use it on. For instance, their deployment product "Snap Deploy 2.0", which I'm considering using and is based on the same technology as True Image, is licensed for $19 and based on the number of workstations you'll be deploying on. No extra server license or other messy stuff (although they did split "universal deploy" off as a seperate fee, unfortunately). Also, if you re-deploy to the same computer, it doesn't use up a license. Cool!

Here's why I really like Acronis products:

• Useful documentation
• Download and go!
• Common sense licensing
• Updates are worth it
• Their products support my operating systems: XP, Server 2003, Linux...
• Clean interfaces
• Continuous improvement (without feature bloat)
• They work!
• Free updates when there is a problem
• Latest hardware support
• Good online support
• Products work across lines (Deploy works with True Image)
• They create products that solve problems I face

The approaches I use:

Personal Laptop with 120gb disk

• Image disk-to-disk to another drive monthly (1st of the month)
• Image to USB (300gb) drive as full image monthly (15th of the month, keep previous month's image and incrementals)
• Scheduled incremental image to USB drive image daily, if onsite

Workstations with Server for normal and backup data storage

• Image after installation (permanent) (images and incrementals saved to server)
• Incremental image weekly, to server
• Recreate new images monthly and restart incrementals

User Laptops

• Scheduled full image monthly to USB 2.0 drive, at least as large a drive as original equipment
• Scheduled incrementals weekly to USB 2.0 drive