Application Backups: The little things do matter

We’ve all had the annoying and frustrating experience of our favorite applications suddenly going haywire, losing the customized setting we’ve created for them. In the past, the only way to fix the problem was to uninstall and reinstall the program, and then recreate our settings—assuming that we didn’t forget how we did some of them. For situations like this, Acronis has made things a little easier for you with True Image 10.0 Home. Now you can back up the application settings for some of the most popular programs and utilities available today, and restore them in minutes.

As you might expect, a check box next to a program preset is not selectable unless you actually have that program installed on your PC. Unlike Backup Categories, you cannot modify or make changes to any of the presets supplied by Acronis. Power users probably won’t be too happy about this, but Acronis has undoubtedly worked with the publishers of these specific apps and tested their individual settings in-house to make sure that they restore customized user settings properly. I created a backup of Word 2003, and as I suspected, a quick look through the resulting archive revealed a backup made almost entirely of registry keys—some familiar, some not. Which would explain why the whole process took thirty seconds to complete!

Keep in mind this feature only backs up an application’s settings—and not the actual application or data created with it. If the application itself gets corrupted, you’ll still have to uninstall the application; reinstall it and any service packs or updates—and then restore your customized settings for the program with True Image. Looking through the list, though many are not the most current versions, we see quite a number of popular applications. Acronis plans to update these on a regular basis.

Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express users can back up and recover messages, E-Mail accounts, address books and other settings, as well. Anyone who has ever had to run Detect and Repair for a Microsoft Office program gone bad, and then had to go through all of their Office programs to set them up from scratch all over again as if it were a brand new installation, will really appreciate this new feature in True Image.

Scheduling: Getting the job done consistently and reliably

Even if you’re conscientious about performing backups, a little assistance never hurt anyone. The only way to insure that you don’t miss a backup is to schedule it. True Image 10.0 gives you a lot of power and flexibility in scheduling any of True Image’s backup types, while keeping things simple with its easy-to-use Schedule Task wizard. A long-overdue addition to the Schedule Task Wizard, is True Image’s Backup Policy.

You can use the policy to automatically create a new full backup after a user-specified number of differential or incremental backups have been created. When scheduled backups are performed to a backup location, once any of the backup location’s user-defined limits are reached, True Image will automatically delete the oldest backup.