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Data protection and business continuity are issues that all businesses must address. The best technology for getting those jobs done, however, is often far out of the reach of IT managers at small and midsize organizations.
The good news for IT managers on tight budgets is that more and more vendors are trying to help smaller companies with their business needs.
This past week I spent time testing out a solution from one such vendor: Acronis, with its True Image 9.1 backup software. Ive been fairly impressed with True Image so far. Ive been using the inexpensive ($79) Workstation edition on my primary lab desktop, and I have the Enterprise edition protecting a couple of my Windows servers in the lab.
Its good to see technologies like bare-metal restore becoming accessible to home and small-business users, especially given the constant emergence of new virus, rootkit and spyware threats. With operating systems and applications at ever-increasing risk, traditional file-based backup is not enough protection anymore.
A free trial of the Acronis software can be downloaded at www.acronis.com/download. I strongly encourage IT managers to try out this new platform before rolling out any new backup implementation.
My complete review of the Acronis system will appear as part of a feature focused on backup and restore in the June 5 issue of eWEEK and at eWEEK.com.