Acronis Snapshot technology, Purpose of using Acronis software

Purpose of using Acronis data backup software.

Have you ever experienced system or hard drive crash? No, then you are a lucky man. But do you know average time that hard drive works is about 5 years?! It can be less in case of virus or malware software. When this hard time comes you have to spend hours or even days of your free time reinstalling operating system, all applications and their settings, e-mail with address book and all your data. The worse if your hard drive crashes and there is no possibility to retrieve critical data even after spending a great sum of money in the nearest service center. It is a DISASTER. User friendly and easy to use Acronis data backup and disaster recovery software helps you to save your time with money and protects your computer.

See video tutorials of best selling Acronis True Image Home 2009 to understand how the software works.

What distinguish Acronis software from other backup/restore software? What are the advantages?

There are several exclusive features of the Acronis True Image Home 2009 software that distinguish it from other products. See all new features of Acronis True Image Home 2009 click hear.

Provides multiple backup options in one product: our original disk imaging backup option allows you to protect your entire PC, and our backup options allow you to protect your music, photos, videos, email and application settings.

- Supports Microsoft Vista (including x64 edition), so you can safely upgrade to this new operating system
- Allows you to create backup rules, so you do not have to worry about managing your backups
- Enables you to receive e-mail notifications on your backup status, so you have peace of mind knowing your PC is protected
- Find specific files by exploring backup files
- Use your system during a recovery with the Acronis Snap Restore feature
- Save data to special partition on your hard drive, the Acronis Secure Zone. There is no need to purchase an extra hard drive, CDs, or DVDs to protect your data. This is especially useful for notebook computers.
- Use Try&Decide feature to install potentially unstable software or downloading suspicious e-mails to evaluate them and then decide if you want to keep this stuff on your machine or revert the system back in seconds by simply rebooting your computer.
- Restart your computer by hitting the F11 key in case you computer does not boot correctly with the Acronis Recovery Manager. Even if your operating system has been deleted, the Acronis Recovery Manager can boot your computer
- Run backups while you are using your computer
- Restore your entire PC in minutes, including the operating system, applications, and user settings without reinstallation of any software
- Automate backups on a regular basis by creating a schedule
- Walks you through each task so that you don't need to be a computer expert to use it

As Acronis True Image programs use Snapshot technology there are no restrictions using different applications while performing backup archive creation. It means you can backup your system from within Windows and run other applications.

See Acronis True Image Home 2009 user guide for detailed description of the product.

Description of Acronis Snap Shot technology.

Once Acronis True Image initializes the backup process of a volume (which logically corresponds to a single partition, if there are no Dynamic Disks), Acronis Snapshot Manager flushes the file system mounted to that volume temporarily freezing all the operations on the system volume. Immediately thereafter, the Snapshot Manager driver creates a point-in-time view of the system volume and a bitmap describing the used sectors on this volume. Once the bitmap is created, the filter driver unfreezes the I/O operations on the system volume. It generally takes only several seconds to create a point-in-time view of the volume. After that, the operating system continues working as the imaging process is under way.

Acronis True Image reads the sectors on the system volume according to the created bitmap. Once a sector is read, the appropriate bit in the bitmap is reset. In its turn, the Acronis driver continues working to hold the point-in-time view of the system volume. Whenever the driver sees a writing operation directed at the system volume, it checks whether these sectors are already backed-up, if they are not, the driver saves the data to the sectors that will be overwritten to a special buffer created by the software, then it allows the sectors to be overwritten. Acronis True Image backs up the sectors from the special buffer, so that all the sectors of the point-in-time view of the system volume will be backed up intact. Meanwhile, the operating system continues working and the user will not notice anything unusual in the operating system functionality.

See step-by-step instructions to view basic actions with Acronis software.