Rapid backup, restore for the small business: Phoenix Software announces Acronis True Image 8.0

South African software re-publisher Phoenix has announced availability of Acronis True Image 8.0, a disk imaging, backup and system restore solution targeted at home users and small businesses.

Phoenix Software is the exclusive agent for Acronis in SA, locally reproducing and packaging (republishing) the vendor`s products and distributing them through Workgroup to resellers throughout the country.

"Protecting the data on home and small office PCs is a critical concern for every computer user. With Acronis True Image 8.0, this task is made simple through an automated, wizard-driven process that ensures a reliable backup and restore of a workstation," says Simon Campbell-Young, CEO of Phoenix Software.

True Image 8.0 allows users to create the exact disk image of workstations for a complete file and system backup, providing a comprehensive protection solution. The disk image file includes, among others, the computer data including the operating system, programs, software updates and patches, data files, configurations, preference settings, e-mails, pictures and MP3 files.

"After a fatal system failure, you can restore the entire drive contents to a known, working state or simply replace the lost or corrupted files and folders," explains Campbell-Young.

Based on the Exclusive Acronis Drive Snapshot disk imaging technology, True Image allows the creation of an online system backup without the reboot to keep the system productive. It provides a rapid bare metal restore, dramatically reducing the time to restore unavailable systems.

New features included in Acronis True Image 8.0 are the ability to exclude paging/hibernate files from the disk image and assign the priority for the disk imaging process to enable the PC to prioritise between disk imaging and other applications. This reduces disk backup time and storage. True Image 8.0 also allows for the verification of a disk image before executing the Restore command and File system checking after restoring an image.

* Create the online disk backup image.
* Restore the entire system and/or individual files and folders.
* Create and restore online disk backup images in Windows without reboot.
* Schedule automated backups.
* Create incrementals disk backup images.
* Built-in disk image verification tool.
* Clone and upgrade disk drives.
* View backup logs.
* Automated, wizard driven-operations.

The necessity of having a reliable backup of your system has never been more crucial," said Max Tsypliaev, CEO of Acronis. "As corporate, mission-critical data continues to migrate to the desktop and multimedia PCs become more entrenched as essential parts of consumers` leisure time, guaranteeing the accessibility of data and applications is paramount. In addition," he continued, "being able to perform a bare-metal recovery of lost corporate data in minutes rather than hours or days delivers benefits directly to the company`s bottom line."

"Users have become more dependent on their computers, and time is a most precious commodity," said Stephen Lawton, director of marketing. "Creating a smaller, more efficient image will significantly increase the speed of creating the image, and eliminating temporary data will significantly decrease the size of the image. Together," he continued, "these features, along with more verification processes, further ensure that the images users create will be exact duplicates of the disks. The images will also be created and restored faster."

Phoenix Software will republish, market and distribute the Acronis family of security, disaster recovery and PC/server management products to retail outlets in SA. Acronis True Image 8.0 is available from leading retailers at an RRP of R349 including VAT.