Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 Review

I've just received wind that Acronis has released Disk Director Suite version 10 -- the perfect companion to the extremely popular Acronis True Image (disk imaging backup software)!

Who is Acronis, you ask?

Acronis is a leading software company that specializes in storage management solutions for mission-critical situations. Acronis provides technically advanced (but simple to use) applications for: disaster recovery, backup and restoration, hard drive partitioning, boot management, data migration and other storage management products.

Acronis' line of disk management software has won many prestigious awards from top-notch publications, including PC Magazine, CNet.com, ZDNet, PC World, and many others.

And Acronis Disk Director Suite version 10 is no exception!

Acronis Disk Director Suite: Description

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 is a comprehensive suite that combines a number of popular Acronis products into one complete hard disk management solution. The package includes:

• Acronis Partition Expert: allows you to resize, move, copy, split, and merge hard drive partitions (drive letter) -- and without losing any data! As I will discuss further down the page, having more than 1 partition can be a *very* handy in terms of backing up critical data.
   
• Acronis OS Selector: is a multi-boot software utility that allows you to install multiple operating systems on your PC. Install Windows 98 and Windows XP on the same PC for backwards compatibility -- or perhaps you'd like to installing a free version of Linux? With Acronis OS Selector, it's no problem at all!
   
• Acronis Recovery Expert: allows you to recover accidentally lost or deleted partitions: a very welcome program to have incase of a severe virus attack or catastrophic event!
   
• Acronis Disk Editor: is a disk drive repair tool that allows you to perform advanced operations on your hard disk drive, such as restoration of boot records and hexadecimal editing. The latter certainly won't be of any use to a newbie, but backup and restoration of the Master Boot Record (MBR) can get you out of some very sticky situations (especially if you've ever encountered the dreaded "Operating System Not Found" error message that often means formatting the *entire* hard drive if the MBR has not been backed up!!).

Acronis Disk Director Suite: Partitioning as a Backup Strategy

As I briefly mentioned, Acronis Disk Director Suite is the ideal tool in the combination with Acronis True Image backup. Here's how you can take advantage of these two products together:

• Using Partition Expert, you can split your C drive into 2 (or more) drive letters: set up your C drive for Windows files only (say, 10 GB or more). Then, set the remainder of the drive as your D drive. Use the D drive to store all your user data (such as downloads, installed programs, etc).
   
• Now, when it comes time to create an image backup of the Operating System (Windows), all you need to do is backup the C drive and you could (theoretically) leave the D drive alone. By partitioning the hard drive in this manner, you'll save oodles of time because there won't be as much data to backup. This also translates to less space used to create the backup image -- which also means less CDs and DVDs to use if you're backing up onto a secondary medium!
   
• You can also take this strategy a step further and create scheduled backups from your data partition [the "D" drive] by selecting specific files you need to backup on a regular basis (example: your Simply Accounting Data files).

Thus, using the combination of these Acronis products, you will always have an image of your system and backup of your user data! I have personally been using this exact same strategy on *all* of my computers since the early days of Windows 95.

Acronis Disk Director Suite: Requirements

Acronis Disk Director Suite works with: Windows 98 SE, ME, NT4.0 Service Pack 6 (SP6), 2000 (SP4), and XP (SP2). A floppy drive or CD-RW/DVD-RW drive is required, and a mouse is definitely recommended!

Acronis Disk Director Suite: Conclusion

By itself, Acronis Disk Director is a must-have suite of utilities for anyone interested in setting up and organizing their data on a separate drive letter, installing another operating system, or wanting a little extra insurance incase disaster strikes. Disk Director Suite is also especially useful for existing True Image users when it comes to reducing the time and media required to create a backup.

Acronis Disk Director Suite: Download

Purchased separately, all of the applications that make up Disk Director would cost well over $100 dollars. However -- Infopackets Readers can enjoy this wonderful suite of applications through our web site today for a very low price of $49.95! To download Disk Director Suite, click the link below:

http://www.infopackets.com/articles/acronis+disk+director+suite.htm

And incase you miss the review on Acronis True Image (a *highly* recommended backup solution and enthusiastically voted #1 by our Readers!), refer to the below previous Gazette article:

Acronis True Image 8 Review