Review by J. Peterson

I got this because the backup that comes with Vista Home Premium is useless, and it is ESSENTIAL to have a backup (I know from painful experience).

I installed and used True Image 11 for several months, and now have uninstalled it because the size of the incremental backup I was having it do nightly was growing by 1 - 2 Gig per nightly backup, and had vastly exceeded the total size of what was being backed up. I don’t want to have to maintain that.

In addition, I don’t like have the backup file in some proprietary format that I cannot easily use or verify.

I discovered a free tool from Microsoft called SyncToy that synchronizes a set of files between 2 locations. It doesn’t compress or store things in a proprietary format - you get a mirror copy of your file set, which is just what I wanted. It can also be set to run from the Task Scheduler. So I use this for my nightly backup which is primarily all of the documents, photos, music, etc which is stored under my user name. Because the backup on my other computer is an exact copy, I can easily look at those files to verify their contents. The size never grows, and I can also make a copy to take with me and use remotely. It was perfect and cost nothing.

One other thing I didn’t like about TrueImage is that it would sometime start a process running (trueimagemonitor.exe) that would run for a long time creating tremendous disk activity, slowing everything down. Once I uninstalled TrueImage (which wasn’t easy - I had to use a 3rd party program to find and launch the uninstaller), my computer booted MUCH faster than before.

Maybe these things been fixed in the new version - or maybe not - but I’m not using this anymore.