Acronis True Image 2015 Review

Whether you accidentally delete your personal or professional data or lose it due to any hardware/software failure, such as a hard disk crash, ultimately it’s a grave loss for you. Having a reliable service that automatically creates the backup of your entire PC or particular folder where you keep your important data is always a wise move. Acronis True Image 2015 lets you keep your data completely secure over the cloud or any other storage device such external network/external drive.

The software provides backup and recovery solution for single and network connected PCs. It is available for both Windows and Mac versions which support all the Windows platforms (7, 8, 8.1 & Home Server 2011) and Mac OSX 10.10 respectively. The solution offers both local as well as cloud backup options for your network.

True Image creates an image of your system that can be stored on an external drive, network PC or on the cloud. So you can back up everything, including all apps, files, configuration and operating system, and retrieve them in case of system crash.

Create a copy of your system: This feature creates a mirror image of your PC on the drive. You simply need to select the “Backup” option and then choose the drive where you want to mirror the image. Depending on the available data on your system, it could take some time. While testing the feature, it took around 5 hours to mirror a system with 157 GB of data. Though, it took a little longer, usually takes 3-4 hours, it created an exact copy of the system. There was no extractor or any other software required when we connected the drive to the system. It was like adding the same drive with the same OS and files. If you have backed-up your system over the cloud, then you will be able to restore an entire system using the cloud backup feature.

This function also lets you backup any particular folder or file on any drive over the cloud. Depending on the file size and connectivity, it may takes few minutes or hours. In another test, while backing up a USB drive’s 10 GB assorted data over the network drive it took about 6 minutes and 16 seconds. And while backing up same data over the cloud it took a little longer, about 1 hours and 15 minutes which varies with your network speed.

Schedule your backups: You can schedule the backup daily, weekly or even customise it. For the very first time, it created a full size backup and then only added new files in the next scheduled backup. In our tests, we used a USB drive with 9 GB data and scheduled the custom backup. The first backup file had exactly the same size and later on it took only new or updated files. However, each time it created a single file for each backup. Ideally, the same backup folder should have been updated.

Get notified about the available local storage space: True Image 2015 also has a notification feature that lets you customize the notifications for you. You get notified when the drive’s remaining space is lesser than what you need . For instance, if you have 2 TB of space in the drive and you create an alarm to get notified when 90% of it is consumed, then as you reach nearer to the limit, you’ll get a notification.

Additional Features: True Image sports several features including an automatic scan of the drives on your system for existing backups. One of the interesting parts of the solution is ‘sync’, that allows you to sync entire data, including music, video, files, etc. You can either sync the data over the cloud and share that with other network connected PCs or only sync within your network.

Acronis True Image 2015 also bundles lots of tools including Clone Disk, Rescue Media Builder, etc. Clone disk allows you to create a clone of your HDD to another HDD, while the Rescue Media Builder creates a rescue media on disk drive or hard drive that helps you recover your PC when it is unbootable.

True image also supports Parallels Access that lets you access your system using any smartphone, tablet or other PC when you are not around. It means you can operate your PC even when you are on tour or in a meeting looking for a particular file.