Acronis True Image Home 2010

Acronis True Image Home 2010 A perfect computer backup and hard disk recovery program that allows you to create hard disk drive images and file backups. Acronis® True Image Home 2010 helps you back up computer data and clone hard disk drives (HDD).

Acronis has stepped up its interface not only with an improved, Vista-like look, but with more-logical placement of options, a much better workflow, and much clearer language. Even the help file is friendlier. Combine the program’s nascent sociability with new features–such as One-Click backup, nonstop backup, and online backup–that are actually of use to the average customer, and 2010 is easily the best update to the program in years.

One-click backup is designed to allow less-experienced users to back up as quickly as possible. After you double-click the One-Click icon (the installation places it on your desktop), the program searches for the best location for an initial full backup and performs it. Its location choices were intelligent. With a nonpartitioned drive attached to the system, True Image created a Recovery Zone partition (Acronis’s hidden partition for disaster recovery without a boot disc). When I prepartitioned the same drive as E:, the program saved the image to E:\MyBackup. When no hard drive had enough room attached, the program detected that and started a backup using my DVD burner.

Acronis® True Image Version Comparison:

Features and technologies2010200911 Home10 Home
Acronis Online Backup (New)Yes
Acronis Nonstop Backup (New)Yes
Supports Windows 7 (New)Yes
Archive EncryptionYesYes
Zip FormatYesYes
Backup by File TypeYesYes
Contents SearchYesYes
Dual Destination BackupYesYes
File ShredderYesYesYes
Try&DecideYesYesYes
Drive CleanserYesYesYes
Backup/RestoreYesYesYesYes
Disk ImagingYesYesYesYes
Email Backup/RestoreYesYesYesYes
Acronis Secure ZoneYesYesYesYes
Store to Network Share/FTPYesYesYesYes
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Disk Imaging Software: Acronis True Image Home 2010

Acronis True Image Home 2010 1. About Acronis True Image Home 2010

Acronis True Image is a disk imaging software, developed by Acronis, that creates backups and recovers PC systems.

Price: 14 day trial $49.99 to buy
Operating system: Windows XP/Vista;
Version: Home 2010

Publisher’s description:
Acronis True Image Home 2010 allows you to create an image of a disk while it is running Microsoft Windows or offline by booting from CD/DVD, USB flash drives, PXE, or other bootable media. As a disk imaging software, True Image Home 2010 can restore the previously captured image to another disk, replicating the structure and contents to the new disk, also allowing disk cloning and partition resizing, as well if the new disk is of different capacity.

2. Acronis True Image vs. Norton Ghost

a) Norton Ghost V10, $69.99

No trial available, Windows XP Home Edition/Professional, Windows 2000 Professional ONLY
Includes Norton Ghost 2003 for Windows Me & 98 users

b) Acronis True Image V11, $49.99

14 day trial, Windows XP/Vista, 87MB

While each software has certain unique features, the core functionality of both softwares is essentially equal.  However, True Image’s overall functionality, reliability and UI are more robust and more understandable than Symantec Norton Ghost versions 9 or 10.  Most importantly, in my experience, Symantec’s Ghost versions 9 & 10 have proven to be unreliable and my experience with Ghost (really, all of Symantec) technical support has consistently been dreadful.  I would still choose Acronis True Image over Ghost on functionality and presentation alone; however, on quality of support alone, I cannot and will not recommend any Symantec program.

Furthermore, Symantec has a long & sordid history of acquiring products or complete companies and then discontinuing the products.  I would not be surprised if Ghost were treated similarly in the not-distant future.  Partition Magic, which they also acquired from PowerQuest a couple of years back in release 8 has yet to be updated by Symantec.  The fact that Symantec tech support/development has been unable to isolate the regular random corruption problems I have been experiencing across two releases of the product does not bode well for the future of the Ghost product, in my mind.

I have removed Symantec Ghost from my system. My recommendation and personal choice going forward for a disk-imaging program is Acronis True Image.

User Reviews:

I have used both, i think acronis is best.

you don’t even need to install the software to create or restore images. you just need the bootable rescue disk, which can even be created while program runs in windows.

3. Useful Links:

  • Web site: http://www.acronis.com/
  • Free Download Acronis True Image Home 2010 now!
  • Buy Acronis True Image Home 2010 on amazon.ocm with a low price of $38.99.
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Disk Image Tool: DeepSpar Disk Imager

Deepspar Disk Imager What is DeepSpar Disk Imager?
DeepSpar
Disk Imager is a disk imaging tool built to solve disk-level problems and to recover bad sectors on a hard drive.

Main Features of DeepSpar Disk Imager:

  • DeepSpar Disk Imager is able to retrieve up to 90 percent of bad sectors that are partially corrupted and cannot be cloned/imaged by ordinary means.
  • While system software, such as BIOS or OS, tries to prevent you from retrieving and copying corrupted data, DeepSpar Disk Imager bypasses it to give you access to all available data, good and bad.
  • Special vendor-specific ATA commands are used that pre-configure the hard drive for imaging, reduce the number of read operations and the intensity of the operations, which causes disk degradation.
  • DeepSpar Disk Imager reduces the time it takes to image a disk with bad sectors, doing in hours what could take days or even weeks with ordinary clone/image tools.
  • Failing hard drives are imaged with care and intelligence, using as few passes as possible to get the most information.
  • Stop and continue imaging as needed – configuration information together with the map of good/bad/unprocessed sectors are saved on the destination drive, so whenever you stop you will have the read status of each imaged sector.
  • The imaging hardware automatically resets/reboots drives that become unresponsive to continue imaging process, so you don’t need to stand around watching and waiting for the entire system to be rebooted.
  • Real-time reporting gives you a window on the type and quality of data you’re imaging – while the process is still underway. You can even see the number and type of files or OS structure elements imaged so far.
  • You have total control over imaging parameters: single or multiple passes, read timeouts, retry attempts, bad sector retrieval (Error Correction Code (ECC) processing), selectable ATA read commands, and error-dependent imaging algorithm based on UNC/AMNF/IDNF/ABRT bad sectors or read/ready timeouts. This gives you ability to apply all possible methods to retrieve data from bad sectors of partially failed hard drives in multiple passes.
  • DeepSpar Disk Imager supports only selected ATA controllers, either add-on or onboard. This is required to bypass system software and work on a hardware-level to achieve maximum performance and reliability of the imaging process.

What is DeepSpar Disk Imager Forensic Edition?
DeepSpar Disk Imager Forensic Edition is a portable version of DeepSpar Disk Imager with addition of forensic-specific functionality.

Main Features of DeepSpar Disk Imager Forensic Edition?

  • Deepspar Disk Imager Forensic EditionDeepSpar Disk Imager makes an imaging process “visual”, so you see the read status of each retrieved sector (i.e. whether the sector is integral, partially corrupted or unreadable), what data is being imaged (i.e. whether you are imaging used or unused space of the drive), and what type of files you are imaging (i.e. Pictures, Microsoft Office files, executables, etc.)
  • Stop and continue imaging as needed – configuration information is saved on the destination drive, so you can just select “continue imaging” to continue from wherever you stopped.
  • The map of good/bad/unprocessed sectors is saved in HPA area of the destination drive, so you have integrity status of each sector of the image, which improves quality of the acquired data.
  • Special vendor-specific ATA commands are used to disable Auto-Relocation of bad sectors so that you retrieve data rather then lose it due to the fact that the drive modifies data by itself (remaps bad sectors). Read more about this process in our whitepaper “Disk Imaging: A Vital Step in Data Recovery”.

About DeepSpar:
DeepSpar is an Ottawa, Canada-based company dedicated to providing “serious gear for data recovery professionals”.

DeepSpar was founded on an exclusive partnership with ACE Laboratory Russia to market the PC-3000 family of products in North America.

Useful Links:

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Best Disk Image Softwares 2009

This is the list for the most popular Disk Image sharewares worldwide. And also you can find the Disk Image Freewares from another post in my blog.

1. Shareware: Acronis True Image
Version: 2009
Acronis True Image Home 2009 is an award-winning backup and recovery solution for a good reason: it protects your PC after just one click and allows you to recover from viruses, unstable software downloads, and failed hard drives. Create an exact copy of your PC and restore it from a major failure in minutes, or back up important files and recover them even faster.

2. Shareware: Drive Backup
Version: 9.0 Pro
Protect your hardware, undo software malfunctions or crashes, and safeguard your data with our latest Drive Backup 9.0 Personal Edition. This feature-rich software easily restores your system whenever disaster strikes, and optimizes storage utilization to keep your system running at top speed.

Along with reliable entire disk backup, this powerful application provides you with a new approach to file backup and enhanced recovery tools. Use its Smart Backup to free up disk space.  You can now recover/restore your PC or laptop with our handy bootable, portable rescue USB flash drive.

3. Shareware: OO DiskImage
Version: 3 Pro
Create images and restore entire systems quickly and easily. All the standard and professional features are combined into one single product. You can adjust all the functions to suit your requirements, with options that range from fully automatic to individually customized. Thanks to an improved user interface, it’s now possible to create and manage images even faster. Creating images on a regular basis is really the best way to protect your data from being lost unexpectedly – with O&O DiskImage 3 Professional Edition, you are fully equipped to face any emergency!

4. Shareware: Norton Ghost
Version: 14.0
Protects your computer with advanced backup and recovery. Full system backup (disk image)—Backs up everything on a hard drive or partition.

5. Shareware: R-Drive Image
Version: 4.4
A potent utility providing disk image files creation for backup or duplication purposes. A disk image file contains the exact, byte-by-byte copy of a hard drive, partition or logical disk and can be created with various compression levels on the fly without stopping Windows OS and therefore without interrupting your business. These drive image files can then be stored in a variety of places, including various removable media such as CD-R(W)/DVD, Iomega Zip or Jazz disks, etc.

6. Shareware: Image for Windows
Version: 2.25
An affordable, reliable drive image backup and restore solution that provides an easy and convenient way to completely backup all your hard drive’s data and operating systems. Your backups can be saved directly to external USB and FireWire™ drives, to internal or network drives, and even directly to CD or DVD. The Image for Windows package includes an easy-to-use MakeDisk wizard for creating a recovery boot disk. To restore your data and operating systems back to the way they were when the backup was created, simply boot the recovery disk and restore the partition(s) or drive(s) you need to recover. It’s that easy.

7. Shareware: Exact Image
Version: 2009
Protect your data from accidental loss and restore the whole system in case of OS crash with 7tools Exact Image 2009.

8. Shareware: DFSee
Version: 9.xx
This is a ZIP file with the latest ISO image for the bootable CDROM, plus a small program that is used to add your existing registration key to this image. Instructions to use this program and burn the CDR are included in the ZIP file as well.

The bare ISO image contains a temporary key, expiring about 60 days after release. If you have a registration, it is advised to burn the ISO to a CD after adding your own key with the supplied utility.

9. Shareware: Active@ Disk Image
Version: 3.2
Software that makes an exact copy of any PC disks (HDD,USB,CD,DVD,Blu-ray etc. . . ) and stores it into a folder. The disk images may be used for backups, PC upgrades or disk duplication purposes.

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Disk Imaging: Image by selective head(s)

Drives presented for recovery sometimes have some heads or surfaces damaged (physical damage). The problem is severe enough for the drive to stop working in its native system. However, with the latest upgraded Data Compass DCEXP utility, it is possible now (before installation of MHA replacement) to create a copy of data using the remaining good surfaces or drive heads; small files can even be recovered directly.

What’s more, this procedure will also be essential in cases:

1. When the drive is having read instability problem: by reading the surfaces one by one, it greatly reduces the seek time & times, smoothes the reading of the data, thus in some cases the original “damaged” head or surface becomes available, and users will then have no need to perform a risky MHA replacement.

2. When users have only a donor MHA with some heads damaged also: we can use the native head to read the available data first and then replace it with the donor one for reading the available data; if these two MHAs happen to be a complement to each other (for example native MHA with head 1 damaged, and donor MHA happens to have head 1 remained good), even in fact we don’t have/use a good MHA at all, we can recover all the data on the drive.

See More: Image by selective heads

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