Charlie Likes True Image 8.0

In a review published at digitalwebcast.com, Charlie White takes a look at Acronis True Image 8.0, an image backup software package for Windows. Overall, he gives the package a pretty big thumbs up, so let's see if I can pick some nits with his review!

True Image lets you create a disk partition (which it apparently dubs a "Secure Zone") just for storing its image backups on. That lets you do a disk-to-disk restore (after you boot from a rescue CD) if disaster should strike. At which point, Charlie asks "Why hasn't anyone done this before?" In truth, this is a minor variation of the way many laptops are shipped. To save money (and avoid giving you an actual CD copy of Windows that you might try to install on another machine), the laptop maker will give you a default installation on C:, and then put a mirror image of that on a separate partition on the disk. If you need to do a "rescue", the laptop maker's software will then simply copy that second partition back to C: (neatly losing all the work you've done since you bought the laptop, but that's another issue).

But the real nit to pick here is the fundamental problem of all image-based backup schemes. Yes, it's wonderful that they restore your entire hard disk in one fell swoop. But if they fail at all, then the entire restore operation may be hosed.

More interestingly in the case of True Image is the fact that it performs its backup while you're still running Windows. This means you have to worry about the hot backup problem. What if a Windows application performs a very important operation that involves writing two different pieces of data to the Windows Registry? And what if True Image happens to perform its incremental backup right after the first piece of data is written, but before the second piece of data is written? Then, when you restore that image to disk, you have a messed up Registry. The application expects that either neither piece of data was written, or both were, and may be unprepared (read, crash or otherwise screw up) to deal with this unexpected situation.

Traditionally, image backup programs have dealt with this by requiring you to reboot into DOS (or some other floppy- or CD-based operating system) to perform the image backup. That way, they could be certain that no Windows software (especially Windows itself!) was in the midst of making changes to the disk while the backup was taking place.

Charlie did at least test True Image by backing up, then trashing a PC, before restoring. But a real test of True Image would requiring performing a backup while the Windows machine was busy, with several applications operating on the hard disk, and then, after restoring, confirm that none of the applications see any corrupted data.

All this does not mean that True Image is not a cool program or that you should not use it. It just means that, like all other single strategies for backup, it is not, and cannot be, 100% reliable. When it comes to backup, you want both belt and suspenders!

April 14, 2005April