Acronis True Image 10 Home.(Product/service evaluation)

Byline: Terry Relph-Knight

Acronis True Image 10 Home

Price [pounds sterling]39.94 (download), [pounds sterling]48.37 (CD) Contact Acronis www.acronis.com

Acronis is gaining a growing reputation in the field of disk imaging software. Acronis True Image 10 Home is the simplest of its product range, and the company also makes four other imaging products aimed at the corporate market.

The installation splash screen offers you three choices; install the product, access the user guide or access the technical support via the Acronis website. Installation is straightforward, requiring only the entry of a 25-character unlock code and a system reboot.

Although the user interface is fairly easy to follow, Acronis provides rather a surfeit of routes to achieve the same objective. The main window has a toolbar with five tool icons. Access to these same tools is duplicated, not only in a vertical menu box along the left edge of the Acronis window, but access to three of these tools is also duplicated in the main area of the window. There is even a dropdown menu, accessed from a text menu along the very top of the Acronis window, which duplicates access to these tools all over again.

This gratuitous repetition is unnecessary, inefficient and just makes the user interface look much more complex and busy than it really needs to be. The main area of the window is split into three; Pick a task, Manage a task or Pick a tool. There are only two tasks shown; backup or recovery. Selecting backup opens the 'Create backup' wizard.