Acronis True Image 2014 Premium review

Things are more impressive from within True Image’s recovery environment, which provides a bootable recovery manager in the event that you can’t get into Windows. You’ll need to create the necessary boot disk from the Tools and utilities tab. It’s possible to restore the entire PC from a cloud backup just as you would from a local disk. We tested the performance by backing up two PCs to the cloud. We then reformatted and restored them. The initial backups on both PCs failed; subsequent backups worked. We also had a failed restore on one of the PCs initially, but it worked after that. The other PC restored first time.

Create a rescue disc or bootable USB drive, as you’ll be glad of the bootable recovery environment if a disk fails and you need to restore it to a new one

SYNCING FEELING
One of the advantages of cloud storage is that it’s accessible anywhere you have internet access, making it perfect for synchronising data between multiple computers or people. As with True Image 2013, True Image 2014 lets you specify one or more folders on your PC to synchronise with other computers running True Image (you can buy a three-licence bundle of the Premium edition for £70 and the standard edition for £60). As you might expect, there are also free Android and iOS apps that let you access your sync folders from smartphones and tablets. It’s easy to synchronise folders among more than one PC. Better still, the synchronised folder doesn’t have to be stored at the same place on your hard drive, so you can the same folder, syncedfolder, stored at C:samplefoldersyncedfolder on one PC and D:syncedfolder on another.

Use Acronis’s cloud storage to share and synchronise folders between multiple people

True Image’s remaining features are gathered together in the Tools and utilities tab, which in the Premium edition contains additional options for converting backup types between Acronis and Windows formats. This is a useful feature if you have an existing backup you need to access. There’s also a mounting tool, which lets you access the contents of a disk image as though it were physically installed in the system. The remaining tools are identical between the standard and Premium editions, and include useful utilities for drive and file destruction, disk cloning and for large disk management.

True Image has a comprehensive set of tools, though image mounting and backup conversion are unique to the Premium edition

While little seems to have changed in True Image 2014, over the past year we’ve noticed that True Image 2013 was a step up in reliability from earlier versions of the software. We’ve obviously spent less time with 2014, but it seems equally stable and responsive, even when we left a backup running and used various other features.

While we remain to be convinced about large cloud backups over home broadband connections, it’s just one option in an excellent, comprehensive product. True Image 2014 remains the best software for home and small business users who want to safeguard their data.