58 PCWorld OCTOBER 2019REVIEWS ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE 2020
of people left who use that
storage type.
The tangential but still-
interesting features include
security: 256-bit AES encryption,
block-chain file verification via
Acronis Notary, and electronic
signatures with the company’s
Asign. The latter two features are
available only with the Premium
version. The Standard version
includes Active Protection, which
wards off ransomware, as well as
crypto-mining of your data.
There’s also a cleanup utility that erases
histories and securely wipes the free space on
your hard drive. Add to that the ability to
create a restore partition, and Try & Decide,
which is something like creating a restore
point before you install new software,
allowing you to roll back to the pre-install
state easily. True Image supports restoring to
different hardware (bare metal restore),
though that’s generally become far less of an
issue with Windows 10’s more robust driver
functionality and infrastructure.
If all those features sound like they will use
a significant amount of system resources,
you’re correct. The download is a whopping
600MB, the installation about the same,
and there are six separate background
processes running at all times. The main
program, which admittedly you’ll rarely
need to run, is also rather slow to boot—nodoubt because it is checking your account/
update status and the state of True Image’s
various functions.
There are two things I wish True Image
supported: the aforementioned multiple
destinations beyond the proprietary cloud
adjunct, and non-proprietary container
formats such as ISO, VHD, or even Zip. Not
that True Image has any issues restoring data,
but if you want to browse a backup in 20
years’ time, it would be nice not having to
hunt down an old program to do it.INTERFACE AND DESIGN
Once you know your way around the True
Image GUI, it’s efficient, but there is the
occasional “what the heck” moment. Even
after several years, I still grab the wrong part of
the scroll bar, as the handles are light and the
background dark—the opposite of the norm.
Tiny, somewhat indistinct ‘+’ signs to expandTrue Image has a number of auxiliary tools that are very useful.