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Original article on Let's Talk Computers website

Ease of Backing Up with Acronis® True Image 11 Home

Complete Transcript of Stephen Lawton — Acronis Interview — Host — Alan Ashendorf on Let's Talk Computers

October 13, 2007

Alan: When it comes to backing up your Home Computer System, most of us think that "backup" is a dirty word. So, how can we change that? Our guest, today, is Stephen Lawton, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing with Acronis. And welcome back to Let's Talk Computers, Stephen.

Stephen: It's always a pleasure to be back with you and your listeners.

Alan: Corporations have to back up. They know that they have to back up and they don't even think too much about it. But Home Users think backup is such a dirty word. Why is it always that they have that impression?

Stephen: Today, you have digital pictures; you've got your music; you've got your videos on your computer. You have a lot more data at risk.

Alan: Well, nowadays, the average consumer can have terabytes of hard disk space available to them. And in most cases, they find all kinds of ways to fill these up. They fill them up with their videos; they fill them up with their pictures; they fill them up with their audio files; they fill them up with documents and spreadsheets — anything. And they still put off backing up all this priceless data. It's just a disaster that's looking for a time to happen, isn't it?

Stephen: Absolutely. It's important to remember that computers are mechanical devices. In a hard disk, you've got heads that move back and forth, you have disks that spin at very, very high speeds. It's not a question of, "Will this ever fail?" — it's a question of "When will this fail?" Because, I can guarantee you that every hard disk out there will fail at some point. I don't know about you, but I've had it happen to me more times than I can count.

Alan: You and I are from the old school. When we started, we had to constantly reformat our hard drives, just to make sure that the magnetism stuck. Nowadays, everybody just takes it for granted. They get a new box and it has 750 or a terabyte drive in it, with external hard drives on it and they think that it's going to be there forever.

Stephen: Our work does not last forever; software doesn't last forever. You know, you talk about "the old school" and I remember reinstalling my operating system to get it started again. The point is that not only is our hardware better today, but any time you get something that that's good, you're going to depend on it to the point where when it fails, you are going to lose that much more.

And that's why it is so incredibly important to remember to backup your data, as well as to back up your applications and your operating system. Back when you and I started, software was put on a single floppy disk. Now, there's such an incredibly massive amount of data that's involved in the operating system and all the updates, all the security updates, new applications.

They all have updates, so we're talking about a tremendous amount of time that would be spent, reinstalling the operating systems and reinstalling the applications and reconfiguring the system. It just makes sense to have an exact duplicate of that system that's sitting on an external storage device, where if something happens, you can just go and bring that image back.

Alan: But, the operating system has a feature built in called "System Restore" and people rely on that, until they find out that they shouldn't have relied on that.

Stephen: System Restore is great for restoring the Windows' settings. But, that's all it does. It does nothing for the user's data; it does nothing for the applications; it does nothing for the configuration files. All it does is to bring Windows back to where Windows was before. If you have lost your data or if you have lost your programs — they're lost!

Alan: When you buy your brand-new computer, hopefully you get a System Restore disk — it's a CD or a DVD that you put into your machine and it self-boots and it brings your machine back to a workable state. But, that "workable state" does not include any of your data, does it?

Stephen: No, it doesn't. It brings you back to the configuration that your system had, when it was brand-new. So, it will restore all of the original applications; it will restore the operating system, as if you had just bought the system from your local computer retailer.

The problem is that it doesn't restore your applications that you have added; it doesn't restore your data; it doesn't restore your configurations or for that matter, any of the updates that you have done to Windows. So, you are starting all over with a great new machine, but you have lost every thing that you have done in the interim.

Backup used to be difficult. Backup used to mean going to the DOS prompt; it used to mean spending quite a bit of time in managing your backups; restoring them on different media; trying to keep track of where your data was.

Alan: But, now you have the Software for the Home User that they don't have to worry about the time; they don't have to worry about dropping down to DOS. You can just be in Windows, in a backup and you will really never know that they're backing up.

Stephen: With Acronis® True Image 11 Home — that's our newest version which just started shipping in mid-September — with this version, it makes it very, very easy to back up and more importantly, to restore.

Alan: Do you have to schedule this, once you install the Software?

Stephen: You don't have to schedule it, but you can. And that's a really important differentiator. For years, we have had the ability to schedule backups. But, now we can schedule backups, which are based on changes to your system.

So, let's say you've set up your system so that if you had x-amount of megabytes of new data, be it programs or your own data, it will automatically go and do a backup of your system. We call it the "Smart Backup". If you do it when you start your system, automatically; when you turn off your system; when you add programs; when you delete programs.

Alan: A lot of times, I've set a backup to automatically start and I'll be doing something else and about 20 minutes later, I get a pop-up window that says, my "backup failed because something on my disk wasn't exactly right." And now, I've got to start all over again. That is so frustrating. You have done away with that problem now, haven't you?

Stephen: We have. We now have the ability to recognize a bad cluster on the hard disk and just simply ignore it. We will report it. You'll find out about it; you'll find out about it after your backup is complete. We don't automatically stop when we find a disk failure.

We used to do it the other way. You're quite right. If we recognized a failure of the disk, we would stop and kind of wave our hands, and say, "Hey, Folks, you know there's a problem with this disk — are you sure you really want to back this up?" However, our users told us that they want to have the ability to automatically accept that error and to continue to be able to do their backup and if they have to go back later and fix that bad sector, they are happy to do that.

Alan: You talked a little bit about "cluster" and now you're talking about "sector"? What is the difference and does a home user even have to know about those?

Stephen: Clusters and sectors are just basically the way that the disk is divided at the physical level. A user really doesn't need to know too much about clusters and sectors. But, suffice to say that it's the way backups used to be done, not only from Acronis, but also from many companies.

If there was a problem with the disk, the backup could fail. It would stop and say, "You have to run Disk Check to fix all the bad sectors on the disk, before you can back it up." We have now given the user the opportunity to simply accept those bad sectors and to keep on going.

Alan: Usually a sector is about 128 bytes and if you're talking about a Word document or a spreadsheet or even a database, you may be talking about maybe one row or one record that just didn't get backed up. That's not going to keep you from putting everything else back together again.

Stephen: It really won't. And quite frankly, even if you have a bad sector on your hard disk, quite often that data can still be recovered. It's not an imperative that the hard disk be in pristine, perfect condition. The technology has gotten very, very smart.

Alan: Well, it just makes sense because people back up their hard drive because either 1) they just do it because they want to be safe or 2) they do it because someone told them that their hard drive is failing and they are going to have bad sectors and they're going to have bad clusters. Clusters are a group of sectors. But, at that point, they are trying to salvage anything that they possibly can, as quick as they can.

Stephen: Absolutely. And we now provide that ability, today.

Alan: In backing up our hard drive, there may be things on that hard drive that we don't care about every baking up — say our Temporary Internet Files. Why in the world do we need to back our Temporary Internet Files? In the past, we didn't have a choice, did we?

Stephen: No, we didn't, but we do, today. You have the ability to select certain types of files; certain folders that you simply don't want to want to back up.

Think of a Home-based business, where the person is really concerned about backing up their business files, their spreadsheets, their documents. They might not necessarily care about backing up images, (pictures, MP3files that might be on that particular computer) because it's a business computer.

You can select the types of files that you want to back up. Conversely, that you want to specifically be backing up just your music files or just your videos or just your email. And we have the ability to do that, as well. You can either select the files that you don't want to back up or you can select just the files that you do want to back up. We help you on both sides of that equation.

Alan: Can we set it so that we don't have to back up everything? Can we do things like incremental backups and differential backups for the home?

Stephen: Absolutely. Incremental backups — think of them as backing up everything that's changed since the last time you did a backup. So, maybe you do a full backup on Sunday night and then each night in the week, you'll just back up whatever has changed that day. That's an incremental backup.

A lot of folks like to combine incremental with differential. Let's say that Monday and Tuesday you're just doing an incremental backup to back up those days' activities. Wednesday, you do what's called a differential. That will pick up all of the changes since Sunday, (since your last main backup).

The reason that's useful, is that when you go to restore a backup, you need to have all of the backup files together, in the same place in the same folder. It's just easier to manage fewer files. So, differential backups might take a little bit longer to make, because you are backing up all the changes, since your last full backup. But, now you are only worrying about two files — the full image and your differential.

Alan: The Home User is going to have probably lots of MP3 files, Video files — these large files that you are not ever going to change. Once you put them on your hard drive, why back them up completely, each time? That doesn't make any sense to me at all. You just want to back up the new ones that you have put there. That was something that was only available with the Corporate Edition.

Stephen: Now, you have the ability to select the files that have changed. You can back up your MP3s and after that, back up your new MP3s.

One of the things that people often don't think about is when you buy a song from iTunes, for example — you get to download it once. If you lose it, you've got to buy it again. So, it's important, especially for those users who have large databases of MP3 files, who have got a lot of music. It's really critical that they have a backup of that music, because if for some reason their system failed and they lost it, they would have to buy it all over again.

Alan: Where can people find more information about Acronis® True Image 11 Home and all the other great backup products that you have on your website?

Stephen: They can visit us at www.acronis.co.uk. Acronis is also available from a number of download sites, such as TigerDirect, NewEgg, Amazon.com, and so many other retail sites. In addition, Acronis can also be found in retail stores such as Fry's Electronics, Staples, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Best Buy.

Alan: Stephen, we're out of time. There's so many new features that you've put into the new Acronis® True Image 11 Home and I would love to have you come back on Let's Talk Computer, talking about some of the other great features that you have added to this new Product.

Stephen: Thanks so much. It's always a pleasure to come and visit with your listeners.