Backup app eases file restoration

True Image Enterprise Server (we tested Version 9.1) is a data center-focused client/server application that supports a wide variety of Windows and Linux operating systems and CPUs as clients or servers.

However, it doesn't support MacOS, Solaris and other non-Linux, Unix-like operating systems, such as HP-UX and AIX.

Users and administrators can easily restore files. They just need to walk through a wizard, selecting which files they want backed up and restored, and where.

This process can be performed even more quickly if the user or administrator adds a local-client drive partition that has the operating-system files necessary to boot the system. Then this system can be booted from this partition to restore a damaged one (or one that won't boot because of viruses, Trojans and so on).

After this base-restoration has been accomplished, the rest of the files can be fetched to bring the machine to a more usable state. This method diminishes overall downtime. The downside is that there is no data encryption, though there is some compression that obscures data on network transports as it is being backed up or restored.

True Image's strengths lie in its egalitarian support of most 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows (including NT4, 98 and ME), as well as numerous kinds of Linux (we tested SUSE 10, but Debian, Mandrake, United Linux and others also are supported) through virtually any kind of backup media.

Unlike others we tested, True Image doesn't support continuous backup; therefore, workstations and servers with high data-change rates would not be backed up as often as they should. True Image does support making a bootable disaster-recovery CD/DVD, which lets administrators have hot media to either start restoring machines with disk failures or conduct a bare-metal restoration.

In terms of administration, True Image is very well organized and was one of the most user-friendly products we tested.

For security purposes, True Image allows for archived files to be password protected, but it does not support encryption during data transfer.

In terms of reporting, Acronis produces a log for each backup-and-restoration operation that contains the steps of the action and whether it was successful. But the log does not detail which fields were accessed during the process. The log can be saved in a file, and the system can send notifications of actions via e-mail or as a Windows popup using Windows Messenger Service.

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